


Undone

by domesticadventures



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Croatoan/Endverse, Angst, Anxiety, Canonical Character Death, Community: deancasbigbang, Dean/Cas Big Bang Challenge 2014, Depression, Drug Use, M/M, Panic Attacks, Sexual Content, Smoking, Suicide Attempt, liberties taken with end!verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-24 20:10:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2594915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domesticadventures/pseuds/domesticadventures
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas falls in stages. He likes some of them better than others, these pieces of the life he shares with Dean, where they hunt together and eat together and sleep together and weather the apocalypse together. Of all the things he could choose to do with his newfound free will, this is the thing he wants more than anything. Sometimes, it almost seems like everything is okay, even though the world is ending.  Some days, he’s almost happy.</p><p>By the time 2014 rolls around, though, Cas is essentially living two lives: one where he’s drunk or high or both, and another where he’s regrettably neither. It’s almost familiar, the way he's fighting a war on two fronts, but this time one is against the world and the other is just against himself. Doesn’t matter which war you ask about, though. Fact of the matter is, he’s losing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. beginning

**Author's Note:**

> [cecilia](http://femmechester.tumblr.com/), who spoils me horribly, also created [this beautiful and upsetting art](http://femmechester.tumblr.com/post/108600608447/) based on this fic. fair warning: it contains spoilers (sort of?)!

By the time the apocalypse is in full swing, humanity is quickly losing ground in its fight to remain at the top of the food chain. There are still bastions of civilization, of course; still people trying to carry on as though the outside world doesn’t exist, still trying to buy security with what little liberty they have left. _Better safe than sorry_ , they say, and it’s more a lifestyle than a turn of phrase. They wield guns better than they wield words, these days.

The world at large, though, is on the mend. No one likes to think of it that way, of course; that would be admitting their mistake in labeling this _the end of days_. They say things like _won’t go down without a fight_ , but sooner or later, one way or another, the truth will catch up with them: fighting or not, every last one of them _will_ go down. Humans and croats alike will cease to exist and only the devil and his legion will remain, sleepless, hungerless, tireless, world without end, amen.

Hell on Earth.

That’s what they call it, at least, but here’s the thing: even as they cling to the last vestiges of civilization, they see the beginnings of what will replace it. Already the foliage is beginning to reclaim lost ground, spreading from the prisons people used to call parks and preserves and traffic islands, working its way up through cracks in the concrete. Already their cars are dying and their batteries are corroding and their lights are burning out, and as the skies begin to clear over the rotting husks of their existence, they look at the stars and despair.

Eventually, inevitably, every last scrap of evidence that humanity existed--good or bad, beautiful or ugly, masterpiece or blemish--will be disassembled and scattered, and the result will be stunningly, heartbreakingly lovely.

Next to Dean Winchester, the end of the world is the most beautiful thing Cas has ever seen.


	2. 2009

Castiel gets the story in bits and pieces, in fervent whispers over angel radio, in rumors and fragments laced with both excitement and contempt. It’s only when he catches the phrase _doing our work for us_ that he finally tunes out.

“You walk out that door, don't you ever come back,” Dean had said, blood on his face, glass in his hair.

They’re the last words Sam will ever hear from his brother.

\--

Castiel finds Dean on the road, already putting as many miles between himself and Sam as he can manage.

“What the hell do you want?” Dean says, and Castiel decides to answer the question Dean isn’t asking. Castiel tells him everything -- about Lilith and the final seal, about the angels’ plans to bring about the apocalypse, about Sam and Dean’s roles as vessels for Lucifer and Michael. He doesn’t know what else to do.

“You’re playing right into their hands,” Castiel says, practically begging. “It’s up to you to stop it, Dean. Please.”

“No, it isn’t,” Dean says, flatly, without hesitation. “It’s not my goddamn responsibility.”

“I heard about your fight with Sam, but--”

“Oh, you _heard_ about it,” Dean spits, tightening his grip on the steering wheel, eyes adamantly on the road. “You weren’t there,” he continues, quieter. “You didn’t see the look in his eyes. He had a choice, Cas. He had a choice and he chose Ruby. This is his problem. This is _your_ problem. But it sure as hell ain’t mine. I’m done.”

Castiel doesn’t know where to go from there, so he tries again a few days later. He finds Dean standing over the open trunk of the Impala, loading salt rounds into a shotgun.

“What are you doing?” Castiel demands.

“Hunting,” Dean says, and before Castiel can interrupt, he adds, “and you can help me _with that_ or you can fuck off.”

Castiel fixes Dean with a glare, but he catches the gun Dean tosses to him.

Later, when they stand together over an open grave, Dean lets Castiel drop the match.

“Congratulations,” Dean says, clapping Castiel on the shoulder. “Your first salt and burn. You’re officially a hunter.”

Castiel stares into the smoke and flames and prays the solution to all their problems might be so simple.

For the first time in millennia, he despairs.

\--

Dean doesn’t ask Castiel to keep tabs on Sam; on the contrary, he says _we have work to do_ and does his best to act as though nothing has changed. Castiel understands humans better in theory than in practice, but he knows enough of Dean, at least, to fill in the blanks, to listen to the things he says between his words and in his silences. He easily dismisses the idea that Dean doesn’t care or will never want to know about his brother, so he doesn’t ask permission to disappear in the four or three or two hours when Dean is asleep and doesn’t offer an explanation when he vanishes during the many, many more hours when Dean is driving.

Sam, though, Cas does not understand. _Abomination_ , he thinks, as Sam eyes the bodies that once housed Lilith and Ruby. Sam’s face twists into an expression Castiel can’t quite place when he looks at the latter, but as he turns away it shifts into something simpler, something more familiar, and when Castiel marks the disgust in Sam’s eyes as he surveys what he has wrought, he cannot find it in himself to disagree with the assessment. He watches with detached interest as Sam pulls the lifeless vessel of the anonymous demon whose blood helped him break the final seal from his trunk, dragging it into the church as he tries not to retch.

Castiel doesn’t know what he was expecting, only that it wasn’t what happens next; Sam retrieves a fuel canister from his car and, once he’s distributed its contents around the perimeter, he sets the entire building ablaze. Sam takes his phone out of his pocket, looks at it long and hard before tossing it into the flames and turning away, as though it’s that simple to leave the most colossal mistake of his life behind.

It’s the first time Castiel realizes that perhaps the reason he doesn’t understand Sam is because he’s never tried. He decides to start now and doesn’t register the irony.

Castiel watches as Sam gets into his stolen car and drives. That’s all he does the first few days, stopping only to get gas or food or rest on the side of the road, constantly in motion, unsettled as though he’s waiting for something. Castiel notices more now that’s he looking for it, and on the third day, he realizes what it is.

Castiel finds Sam still driving, his knuckles white on the steering wheel, his left foot tapping out an unsteady rhythm on the floor. When Sam finally pulls over, Castiel watches him check into the type of motel he’s used to, the kind where he can pay in advance and where no one will ask too many questions. Sam’s hands are already shaking as he hands over the fake credit card, the accompanying smile not quite as charming or as convincing as perhaps he was hoping. It doesn’t matter. Castiel knows the bored-looking receptionist cares about Sam and his story exactly as much as Sam wants, which is not at all.

Sam makes his way to the tiny room, freezing in place as soon as he flips on the lights and surveys the single, too-short bed sagging forlornly against the far wall. He forgoes laying down, even though it’s the middle of the night, tossing his bag onto the mattress unceremoniously and opting for the rickety chair nearby. Castiel leaves Sam sitting at the tiny motel room table, head in his hands, long fingers rubbing circles against his temples.

When Castiel returns the next night, it’s clear Sam hasn’t slept. His eyes are wide and red, and his entire body is trembling. He lays on the bed, now, drenched in sweat, hands fisted in his hair. When he finally gets up, it’s to go to the bathroom and spend the next thirty minutes retching fruitlessly before returning to bed. Sam turns restlessly, alternately clutching his head and his chest and the sheets, and does not sleep. Castiel does not stay.

Sam gets progressively worse over the next few days. On his third night in the hotel, Sam pleads for relief, an endless stream-of-consciousness prayer asking _please let this be over soon, please, please_. On the fourth night, he pauses his mantra long enough to call Castiel’s name; the angel stiffens in his seat at the table, mind racing to discern how Sam could have seen him, until he notices Sam’s eyes are out of focus, staring at a point somewhere to Castiel’s left. Sam begs whatever image of Castiel he sees to help him, to heal him, and when that doesn’t work, he asks for Dean, for his parents, for Bobby, for anyone. Castiel watches and does nothing. Sam has made his choice; it is not his place. He shifts uncomfortably in his seat all the same before disappearing silently.

On the fifth night, Sam prays for death. Castiel smiles wryly. God isn’t good for much wish-granting these days.

For reasons he doesn’t understand, it takes Castiel a week to convince himself to go back to checking in on Sam after that. When he finally does, he’s relieved to find Sam back on his feet, if unsteadily. The first thing Sam does, filthy as he is, is take a shower. The second thing he does is order a pizza. Sam spends the thirty minutes before the delivery guy gets to his room saying a prayer of thanks that the only reasons he seems to be shaking are hunger and exhaustion. He spends the next ten eating the entire pizza in one sitting. He waits an hour and doesn’t throw it up, then sleeps for the next twenty.

Castiel isn’t even trying to read Sam’s thoughts at this point, but he can’t help it. Guilt and shame roll off Sam in waves, and the strength of the second-hand emotions is so overwhelming that Castiel tries not to feel nauseous himself. He watches as Sam waits until he’s physically well and hates that he knows why even then, Sam doesn’t leave the hotel. It takes Sam another few days to come to terms with the fact he’s still alive, and then he gets up and moves on.

Sam travels. He finds cases on his own and hunts with a ruthless efficiency Castiel recognizes all too well, but he can still see the hunger, the need, in Sam’s eyes every time he lays a devil’s trap, every time he carries out an exorcism. Castiel knows Sam is waiting for the feeling to fade, can pinpoint the exact moment when he realizes it isn’t going to in the set of his jaw, in the way he redoubles his efforts. Castiel, for all his skepticism, admits a begrudging respect.

Castiel keeps tabs on Sam off and on after that, watches as the number of people he’s saved on his own climbs into the dozens, the hundreds. He wonders if it will ever be enough to counteract the massive moral debt Sam has placed upon himself. Somehow he doubts it.

Castiel watches as Sam does his best to stay focused, to tune out the apocalypse, but as Lucifer’s plan kicks into gear, it becomes impossible for Sam not to hear about it, regardless of how hard he tries to avoid watching the news. Most people are in the sort of thoughtless panic that comes from not knowing the cause of their aggressor, but Castiel is sure Sam recognizes the signs. The disease, the hunger, the fighting -- Sam knows his mythology well enough, certainly, to see it all as part of a bigger plan.

Even as the symptoms of the apocalypse spread, Sam continues to fight. He tries to save as many unwilling vessels as he can, retraining himself to take the time to plan carefully, to lay traps and chant exorcisms after so much time spent with Ruby’s knife and his own powers as convenient shortcuts. Sam saves more than he might have, but he can’t save them all, and every time he checks for a pulse and finds nothing, the regret behind his eyes gains just a little more ground.

Castiel thinks: Any day now. Surely any day now Sam’s mounting desperation will convince him to do what needs to be done, to pick up a phone and call Dean because the reverse is never going to happen. Sam will call and relief will wash over Dean’s features as he gives Sam his current location, and they’ll be back on track to stop the apocalypse. Together.

Sam is in Chicago when he gets a preview of the grand finale, when the guilt and the desperation finally become too much to bear. There’s something hanging in the air, ominous and foreboding, something more than the promise of the storm Sam keeps hearing about between songs on the radio, something so thick that even Castiel feels lost in it. Castiel thinks: This is it. This _has_ to be it. But Sam doesn’t call Dean. He doesn’t pray to Castiel. He looks for answers in the books he’s practically memorized, and when that proves fruitless, he sits in front of his laptop and prays for technology to be the one thing that won’t fail him. It’s pointless. Castiel and Sam both know no amount of frantic research is going to stop what’s coming.

Sam dozes off sitting up, fingers still on keys with the letters half rubbed off, and when he jerks awake to silence, when he has time to process the sheer _wrongness_ of it, Castiel notes a change in Sam’s features. There’s something in the furrow of Sam’s brow, the hesitance in his movements, that gives Castiel pause; for the first time, Sam looks _scared_. He must know he isn’t going to like what he sees when he goes outside, but he gets up anyway.

What Sam finds when he opens the door is a city in ruins. The look of utter resignation on Sam’s face makes Castiel want to run, so he does, and that’s when he decides to take matters into his own hands, even if the Winchesters have washed theirs of this whole debacle. Castiel stops waiting for Sam to call his brother and starts waiting to see his own whispering in Sam’s ear.

Sam is in Detroit the next time he recognizes the signs, and Castiel does not see his brother, but he sees Sam close his eyes, clench his fists.

Hears him whisper, “ _Enough_. Enough. The answer is yes.” And suddenly, horribly, Castiel realizes his mistake.

Of course he didn’t see Lucifer for himself, but that’s no excuse. He should have known what was happening; should have known that Lucifer didn’t need to be there to frame everything as Sam’s fault, didn’t need to perch on Sam’s shoulder and twist the knife in Sam’s gut with every unnecessary death, every casualty of the war humanity doesn’t yet realize it’s fighting. Sam did that to himself, did it all on his own.

Of course Lucifer wouldn’t have needed to make an appearance. Why go to the trouble, why waste the effort on soft words and subtle lies when all along there has been one truth Sam never had any hope of escaping: Only one word could bring the apocalypse to a halt, and that one word had to come from him. Lucifer needed only to wait, and all along he had been the only angel with all the time in the world.

Of course Sam stood in the ruins of Chicago and saw this written in the torn-up streets, the crumbling buildings, the lack of life and light and sound: _I did this, all of it, for you_.

Castiel doesn’t stay to watch the transition, but he feels it happen even from hundreds of miles away, feels all of Sam’s guilt and helplessness and exhaustion wiped away in one swift motion, replaced by something far more cold and calculating and terrifyingly familiar.

Sam is gone, and the grief Castiel feels is entirely his own.

\--

He was stupid to think himself so important.

He fancied himself Castiel, great advocate for humanity and champion of free will, and yet when the burden was on him, when it was make or break, when it came down to _his_ life and _his_ choices, he chose to let everything go according to the script he told himself he would do anything to tear up. He kept waiting for the perfect moment, some sudden revelation where it would be clear he needed to intervene, to make a grand entrance and play the hero. With every second he delayed, every minute he simply watched events unfold, every hour he refused to get his hands dirty, Castiel took one more step down the same path he had been walking all along. He let his own sense of superiority blind him, lied to himself until he really believed that there was nothing he could do.

To be fair, maybe there wasn’t. Maybe nothing he could have done would have stopped Sam from saying yes. But the fact remains he just watched and didn’t even try, and it’s such an  _angel_ thing to do that it makes him sick. He thought he was better than that, thought himself above his brothers and sisters for his ability to go against the grain, thought he had the power to help rewrite this story, but he just proved himself wrong, didn’t he? How stupid he was to think himself so important. How utterly, unbelievably stupid.

The worst part, Castiel thinks, is knowing how the story is supposed to go. The next step is for Dean to say yes and for Lucifer and Michael to fight it out, safety of humanity be damned. But he knows now more than ever he can’t let that happen, he owes it not just to humanity but to Sam and to Dean and to himself to make this right. He thinks about what it might have felt like, had he stayed -- what it might have been like looking at Sam and seeing Lucifer’s light dance behind his skin, Lucifer’s thoughts running through Sam’s mind, Lucifer’s voice coming from Sam’s mouth. He thinks what it would be like to see and feel and hear Michael with Dean’s face and Dean’s voice and he shivers, and he knows what he has to do.

But if thinking he could change the story on his own was his first mistake, thinking the angels will help him change it is his second. Surely, he thinks, the warriors of God will go on fighting God’s battles -- but when he turns his efforts towards them, goes to ask them to keep Dean from giving in and working to stop Lucifer from doing more harm than he already has, he finds that dozens have already given up and left. They’re soldiers, all right -- but soldiers need a leader, and Castiel may fancy himself a commander, but he’s not Michael and that is not how the story goes. They offer to keep fighting on the condition Castiel convinces Dean to say yes, and he recoils with the shock of how badly he has misjudged the situation yet again.

“You have to choose,” they say. “Us or them.”

Castiel hesitates, and that is answer enough.

Some hang around longer than others, and Castiel wants to be hopeful about their reason for lingering, but he knows they’re just waiting to see if he changes his mind.

He can feel it, can sense it each and every time another angel hightails it back to heaven, like tendrils of his grace being cut, taut strings snapping back, making his chest ache. It’s unprecedented, this angelic exodus; it’s not like the apocalypse is an everyday kind of deal, and he’s scared of what’s going to happen when the last angel leaves and heaven boards up its gates. He doesn’t know if he’ll even be useful to Dean or if all his powers will disappear sooner or later.

But he’s made his choice, and he’s going to stay. It’s the only apology he has to offer.

 


	3. 2010

Castiel is expecting it, but it still manages to sneak up on him.

They go on hunting, but it’s little more than a formality, a token gesture considering the millions that Death will leave in his wake. Still, they continue as though nothing has changed, and as Cas learns the ropes, Dean jokes that he’s not even necessary, that hunting is far too easy with Castiel around to teleport and heal wounds.

“Like my own personal Superman,” Dean says, just a few weeks after Sam falls -- long enough that Castiel’s grief isn’t so fresh; long enough that he hasn’t begun to feel anything else.

Castiel doesn’t understand the reference, but he likes the sound of it. He’s rolling it over in his mind when he catches Dean giving him a strange look. “What?” he demands, frowning. He’s finding Dean’s dismissal of his continued pop culture ignorance grates on him more and more with every passing day, and he’s waiting for Dean to sour the moment with a roll of his eyes and a “Nevermind.”

So it surprises him a little when Dean covers his mouth with his hand, tries not to laugh. “Nothing, man,” he says. “It’s just...you were smiling. Looks good on you.”

Castiel narrows his eyes. It’s not that he’s suspicious of the compliment, it’s just...unexpected. It’s comforting when Dean finally _does_ roll his eyes, after Castiel has clearly taken longer than the socially acceptable amount of time to respond. “Whatever,” Dean says. “Zap us out of here, will you?”

Castiel places his hand on Dean’s shoulder, sits with it there for a good ten seconds.

Dean raises an eyebrow. “Take your time,” he says. “I’ll just continuing relishing the smell of rotting corpses.”

Another ten seconds pass, twenty, thirty. Castiel is gripping Dean’s shoulder tightly now, closing his eyes, frowning in concentration.

Dean’s expression shifts to something that’s less sarcasm, more concern. “You okay, man?” he asks. “What’s happening?”

Castiel opens his eyes, then, and looks straight at Dean.

“I’m falling.”

\--

Castiel falls in stages.

The sudden loss of his powers comes as a shock, but the other changes have a way of sneaking up on him. With each new surprise he thinks of it, at first, in terms of gains rather than losses, as a reward for his loyalty. He can’t even really quantify it initially, the way he seems to be softening, blurring around the edges.

The impassivity that was once his default is slowly replaced by an occasionally frustrating inability to control his own expressions. His face seems intent on betraying his every thought before he’s able to give them voice, his every emotion before he’s able to analyze and quantify them. Irritating as it can be, though, it changes something between Dean and himself for the better. There’s an easiness to their conversation, to every interaction, that was never present before. There’s a new softness to Dean, too, in the quirk of his smile, in the tone of his voice, even in the way he rolls his eyes. The tradeoff is, perhaps, worth it, Castiel thinks.

\--

Taste and smell come next, one quiet evening when he’s sitting across from Dean in a diner after a long day in the Impala. The waiter takes their orders -- Castiel still doesn’t need to eat, strictly speaking, but he does it to make Dean feel less awkward about eating in front of him -- and brings them glasses of ice water to sip while they wait for their food. Castiel picks up his glass absently, gulping down a mouthful, and that’s when it hits him: It tastes not of _dihydrogen monoxide_ but rather just water, crisp and refreshing and not much of anything in the flavor department. He sets the glass back on the table abruptly, staring at it in shock he knows he hasn’t been able to keep off his face.

“You okay, man?” Dean asks, bemused.

A slow smile spreads across Castiel’s face. “Yes. I think I am.”

The meal that follows is the first one Castiel truly enjoys, burgers and fries and side salad (Dean is so enjoying watching Cas eat he doesn’t even complain about that), first on their own and then with all the condiments he can get his hands on, and the waiter is looking at him with a raised eyebrow as he brings ketchup and mustard and mayonnaise, hot sauce, sriracha, worcestershire, pickle relish, five kinds of salad dressing. Castiel eats quickly and messily, doesn’t notice when he gets food on his face, licks sauce off his fingers shamelessly. Dean doesn’t take his eyes off Cas as he finishes his own meal, as though he’s drinking the experience down, savoring every moment.

When Dean orders them three kinds of pie for dessert, he looks like a kid on Christmas morning. But it’s nothing compared to the look on his face as he watches Cas wolf down the huge slices, rotating bites like he can’t decide which one he likes best -- which, to be fair, he can’t. It’s all too much.

Cas eats until he’s way too full and spends the entire ride back to the motel groaning as he sinks lower and lower into the seat. It turns out it’s just the precursor to the evening, the better part of which Cas spends on his knees in the bathroom, Dean rubbing his back soothingly as he pukes his guts out.

“Sorry, man,” Dean says. “Guess I shoulda warned you.”

As soon as Castiel stops retching long enough to catch his breath, he looks up at Dean and grins. “Worth it.”

\--

It takes Castiel a long time to understand the point of music.

He know what it _is_ , of course: just vibrations traveling through the air, starting from the point A of a voice, an instrument, the cosmos, the minute vibrations of all matter, until eventually they reach the point B of his ears. He’s heard music his entire existence, the background noise singing the praises of a god he isn’t sure he still believes in. It seems something so distant now, so pointless.

The music that comes from the speakers in the Impala seems like something even further divorced from that, if that’s even possible. There are no actual voices or instruments making the noises that find their way into his head; just an electronic reproduction, pale in comparison. Dean’s music grates against him, the vibrations irritating his ears, giving him a headache. He complains about it almost constantly as they drive. Dean continues to sing along obnoxiously and Castiel has the sneaking suspicion he’s only pretending not to be able to hear his protestations over the music. His hearing is still better than the average human’s, but he has a hard time believing it’s _that_ much better.

The flaw in Dean’s plan becomes apparent as soon as Dean starts teaching Cas to drive, however. Dean is probably kicking himself for not realizing Cas would take some liberties. Castiel, for his part, was counting on it.

Cas is getting the hang of it, the right amount of pressure to put on the pedals, the right amount to turn the steering wheel so he doesn’t drive like he has a deathwish. The first time he’s confident enough to drive with one hand, he reaches over to the console and switches from the cassette player to the radio.

“Hey--” Dean starts, but before he can protest any further, Castiel shoots him a withering glance.

“Driver picks the music,” he says seriously, “shotgun shuts his cakehole.”

And, well, Dean can’t exactly argue with that.

At first, Castiel is forced to constantly fiddle with the dials, switching from one radio station to the next in a desperate attempt to find something that doesn’t give him a headache. Dean seems to relish being melodramatic, complaining Cas is messing with the radio just to screw with him or being annoying on purpose. Castiel resents that a little. He feels like this is important for a reason he can’t quite find the words to explain.

It comes to a head one day when Dean says, after one too many twists of the dial, “Jesus, Cas, this is torture.”

Castiel gives him a sideways glance, determined to prove, if nothing else, that’s he’s a better driver than Dean in his ability to actually keep his eyes on the road. “Yes,” he says dryly, “having been to hell ourselves, we both know this is comparable.”

Dean bristles at that, but he shuts up. Cas feels bad about taking a cheap shot, but he’s also pissed because if Dean were actually paying attention, he would have noticed that Cas _wasn’t_ just turning the dial at random, and he certainly wasn’t doing it just to annoy Dean. He’s trying to find things he likes, and once he gets the feeling maybe a song is one he wants to hang onto, he gets caught up in trying to find it playing again. He just doesn’t really understand why he’s bothering with it, why he feels like it’s so important, and if he can’t explain it to himself, he knows he definitely won’t be able to explain it to Dean.

Castiel changes the station again and Dean sighs, and he tries to sum up all of that, but all he manages is a mumbled “I’m just trying to figure things out.” It sounds horribly insufficient, even to him.

He resigns himself to being unable to formulate an acceptable explanation as they spend the next few weeks trading off driving and picking the music. Cas prides himself on the fact that despite the difficulty in hearing the same song multiple times with the erratic and apparently nonsensical decisions made by the various radio stations, he’s beginning to pick up on tunes and lyrics. He’s begun to hum along to what he realizes are becoming his favorite songs, and that’s when he finally gets it. The truth is, he _had_ been finding songs he liked, ones that resonated with him in one way or another -- songs that just got something _right_ in the way they strung together notes or sounds or words, songs that remind him of heaven, of Dean, of handprints and phone calls and promises. It was just so hard to find them in the midst of everything else on the radio, all the talk shows and advertisements and televangelism. He’s just trying to find them all, all the songs that will tell him, piece by piece, who he is.

He figures Dean must finally have noticed, too, because for some reason he can’t seem to find it in himself to complain about Cas’ taste in music, no matter how bad he claims it is. One evening, Dean even falls asleep to the sound of Cas singing along to one of the few songs they both enjoy. The freeway is nearly empty, so Castiel indulges his whim and watches Dean sleep, like it’s something he’s still allowed to do, until Dean wakes up and catches him staring.

“Eyes on the road, buddy,” Dean says, straightening in his seat. Cas obliges, fascinated by the slow heat creeping across his cheeks and down his neck.

The following day, Dean mutters some vague explanation about needing to run errands, grabs his keys and laptop and ignores Cas’ raised eyebrow. He’s gone for hours doing god knows what and just when Cas is about to start worrying, Dean returns and tosses Cas the keys.

“Let’s go for a drive,” he says, and Castiel doesn’t argue.

It’s only when they’re sitting in the Impala that Cas glances over at Dean with a look that says, “Where to?”

“This is for you,” Dean says in lieu of an explanation, shoving a cassette at Cas without meeting his eyes.

Castiel looks down at the object in his hands. On the front, written in what Cas presumes is Dean’s sloppy handwriting, are the words “For Cas.”

He looks up at Dean. “Yes,” he says, “I can see that.”

“Dammit, Cas,” Dean says, refusing to meet his gaze, “just play the damn thing.”

Cas obliges, pushing the cassette into the player as he starts up the car, and then they’re driving to nowhere with the music Dean has chosen beginning to filter through the speakers.

They’re not even thirty seconds into the first song before a huge grin spreads itself across Cas’ face and remains there for the duration of the drive. Dean tries not to look too pleased, but every time Cas manages to steal a glance, it’s clear he’s pretty freaking proud of himself.

Cas likes the sound of it. Dean has chosen well, managed to pick out the songs that have become more than just the sum of their vibrations, their basslines, their words, every song upon which Cas has lingered, every song whose lyrics he’s already memorized, every song that represents some small part of who he was or who he is or who he’s becoming.

“Pretty good playlist for the end of the world, huh?” Dean asks.

Castiel likes the sound of that, too.

\--

\--

Castiel’s favorite acquisition, by far, is touch.

For the longest time, he didn’t really understand the importance of it. He understood the concept, of course, but only to the extent he knew it was largely an illusion. Everything on Earth sits at the periphery of everything else, nothing ever _really_ touching. Say what you will of intelligent life, but humans are nonetheless made up mostly of empty space. They can place all the emphasis they want on touch, but the reality remains the same: their electrons may interact with objects, with the atmosphere, with plants and animals and other people in cursory ways, but their atomic nuclei never actually come into contact with one another. Nothing ever really touches anything else; nothing ever really gets to the core of anything else. The exceptions are the stars with their nuclear fusion, beautiful and destructive, but humans are not stars, and their attempts at replicating the process are feeble at best, the experiments of children fumbling in the dark.

Cas finds it hard, now, to imagine a time when he seriously felt that way. He tries to recall what that sort of calm detachment must have felt like during all the times he finds this new sense annoying, tries to latch onto it as a distraction with limited success when he has a bug bite or scrapes and bruises or they’re staying in a crappy motel with no air conditioning in the middle of summer or he’s plagued by a thousand other things that seem intent on tormenting him on an almost daily basis.

The first time Cas becomes aware of the feeling of his clothes against his skin, he thinks he’s going to lose his mind. Months and months of wearing the same outfit and suddenly he can’t stand it, can’t stand the way the fabric rubs against his skin, the way the ill-fitting jacket pulls at his shoulders when he turns, the way the pants dig into his waist, the way his socks bunch around his ankles, the way the coat feels heavy and stifling.

He spends a good hour shifting restlessly in the passenger seat, trying to find a comfortable position, picking at his clothes, scratching at his skin, fiddling with the dials on the air conditioning before Dean huffs an exasperated sigh and asks, “All right, man, what gives?”

“I can _feel_ ,” Castiel explains, unhelpfully.

“Okay,” Dean says, equally unhelpfully, an edge of amusement in his voice. “Feel what?”

“ _Everything_ ,” Cas says, and the combination of melodramatic whining and legitimate misery is just enough to make Dean cave and pull off the road to stop at the first motel he can find.

When they get into the room, Castiel immediately strips down to his boxers and just stands there looking distraught until Dean suggests he “try taking a shower or something” in a tone of voice that has an edge of desperation to it, that says he’s becoming more worried than amused.

Cas gets in the shower, and he hates the pathetic drizzle that runs through his hair, down his back, over his eyes, hates the way it doesn’t get anything hotter than lukewarm, but he stands there anyway until his skin becomes oversaturated and wrinkled, and he hates that, too. He turns off the water and hates the sudden shock of cold that hits him as he pushes aside the curtain. He dries off and hates the feel of the cheap, scratchy motel towel against his arms, his torso, his thighs. He puts his boxers back on, walks back into the room, sits at the table and tries desperately to keep his limbs still until he can no longer tolerate the feel of the metal against his bare arms and legs, sapping away his body heat. He gets up and paces from one wall to the other, hating the feel of the barely-there carpet against the soles of his feet, until he tires himself out. He lays on the bed and tries not to think about how much he hates the feel of the sheets at every point they come into contact with his body. He hates it, he hates it, he hates it.

Dean tries to distract Cas from his sensory overload without success. He’s too restless for reading or television or conversation, doesn’t want to go outside or get something to eat or take another shower, and after hours of suggestions and aborted attempts at placation, Dean finally throws his hands up in the air and tells Cas to try and get some sleep. They lay there in the dark for what feels like hours, and Cas keeps scratching away at his skin until Dean exhales sharply in frustration and flicks the light back on.

His annoyance evaporates the second he sees the state Cas is in, skin mottled red and white from the scrape of his fingernails, nearly raw in places. Cas feels like he’s on the verge of crying from sheer frustration and wonders if Dean can see that, too.

“Jesus Christ, Cas,” Dean says. He rolls himself out of bed, and in the space of thirty seconds he’s pulled on some clothes and is grabbing his keys, promising to be right back, he’s just going down the road a ways, he saw a Walmart on their way in. Cas doesn’t process much beyond his own misery, so he continues lying there and tries not to rub his skin off as he waits for Dean to return.

Dean comes back an eternity later and shoves something into Cas’ hands. Upon inspection, it appears to be a huge bottle of lotion. “Hypoallergenic,” Cas reads aloud. “For sensitive skin -- no dyes or perfumes.” He stares at it skeptically. He fiddles with the pump attached to the top, hoping Dean will think this sufficient and stop staring at him expectantly. He doesn’t want to disappoint them both when it doesn’t work. He just wants to be left alone to wallow.

But Dean is still watching him, so Cas continues his halfhearted attempts at progress, even if only to keep his hands busy. When he finally succeeds in transferring some lotion onto his hand, it’s more an accident than anything. He stares at it with a mixture of confusion and distaste, shifting uncomfortably as he resists the urge to scratch, seriously doubting this cream will bring him the relief he desires. He feels like his arms and legs are on fire. He thinks he’s earned the right to be petulant.

He waits long enough that Dean rolls his eyes and stands up, and he thinks finally he’s going to get a chance to quietly indulge his self-pity. Instead, Dean stands in front of him and holds out his hand.

“Give it here,” Dean says, and before Cas has a chance to respond, he takes the bottle and wipes the blob of lotion from Cas’ hand with his own. He sits back down, next to Cas rather than on his own bed, and shifts his face into what appears to be his best attempt at clinical detachment. He takes in a deep breath through his nose, and then he begins rubbing lotion into Cas’ nearest arm.

Cas, wonder of wonders, doesn’t hate it.

Dean moves on to Cas’ shoulders and chest, his back, his legs and feet, and Cas watches him, notes the way Dean keeps his eyes solely on his own hands as the two of them are turned towards one another. Dean’s face is stern, but his hands are gentle, and Cas wonders at this juxtaposition. There’s something he’s missing, here, some connection he’s not making, something he’s too tired and too human to see right now.

Cas is still contemplating this when Dean finishes, and he notes that when he breathes a sigh of relief, Dean lets out a breath Cas didn’t know he had been holding.

Cas looks at him, then, really _looks_ in the way that used to come so naturally.

“Thank you, Dean,” Cas says, hoping his sincere gratitude is as obvious as he wants it to be.

Dean clears his throat, shifts uncomfortably, like he’s just now become aware of their proximity. “Yeah, uh, no problem. Any time,” he mumbles, patting Cas on the shoulder awkwardly before returning to his own bed.

“Now get some sleep,” Dean instructs. “For real this time.”

Cas complies.

\--

\--

Cas wakes well after noon, yawning and stretching.

“Morning, sunshine,” Dean says with a smirk that fades when Cas fixes him with a stare. Cas has, for some reason, the impression Dean has been watching him sleep. A theory is developing in his mind, something vague and hopeful and half-formed. He intends to test it.

“Morning,” Cas replies absently, fingers already moving to scratch at his shoulders.

“Still itching?”

Cas takes a moment to evaluate. He does, kind of, if not unbearably so. He thinks about how to respond. “Yes,” he says, picking the bottle of lotion up off the nightstand and holding it out to Dean.

Dean rolls his eyes and sighs, his exasperation somewhat undermined by the fact that he moves to the bed and accepts Cas’ offering, anyway. He repeats the process from the previous night, and for some reason he isn’t able to meet Cas’ eyes until he’s wiping his hands on his jeans and saying, “All done.”

But Dean _does_ meet Cas’ eyes in that moment, and as Cas pins him there with his gaze, watches the way careful affection fades to self-conscious doubt, he starts to see everything that’s happened over the past few weeks and months and years in a new light. Something that was previously intangible shifts into his visible spectrum and he’s finally sure, finally sees what they’ve both been falling towards.

Cas reaches out his hand tentatively, pauses with it hovering in the air to the side of Dean’s face.

“May I?” he asks.

Dean closes his eyes and swallows hard, and there’s an instant where Cas worries that maybe he’d misjudged the situation, but then Dean is nodding and Cas decides to stop making himself worry and start letting himself _want_.

And what he wants is Dean, Dean who is human and aching, Dean who buys him hamburgers and makes him mixtapes and teaches him how to be less than what he was while still looking at him like he’s more than he is.

Cas brushes his fingertips against the slight stubble on Dean’s chin, across the freckles on Dean’s cheekbones, over the soft skin behind Dean’s ears. He runs his hands through Dean’s hair, over the back of his neck. He takes Dean’s hands in his own and maps out the shapes of his palms, the callouses on his fingers, the scrapes on his knuckles. Dean leans into every touch like he’s starving for it, like he can’t remember the last time anyone treated him so gently, so reverently -- to be fair, maybe he is, and maybe he can’t. Cas tries not to think about it as he continues what he hopes will be the beginning of making up for so much lost time.

Dean looks like he’s in a daze as Cas reaches over and begins unbuttoning his shirt, but he nonetheless manages to shift helpfully as Cas slips it down over his arms, tosses it to the floor. Cas moves his hands over Dean’s collarbones, his stomach, his arms, lingers on the handprint on his shoulder. Dean closes his eyes and breathes deep, brings his hands up to clench his fingers in Cas’ shirt as though trying to steady himself.

“I’m not dreaming, right?” Dean asks. The corner of his mouth is quirked up in a small smile, but his voice wavers just enough that Cas can hear the doubt and the fear and the desperation, can feel the echo of every failed relationship Dean has ever wished was something more.

“Oh, Dean,” he says softly, touching their foreheads together, waiting for Dean to get his bearings.

“All right,” Dean breathes, after a minute, hands unclenching.

Cas pushes Dean back onto the bed, his legs still hanging off the edge below the knees, and kneels on the floor to pull off his boots and his socks. Cas runs his fingertips over the soles of Dean’s feet, eliciting an involuntary twitch and a stifled laugh, and he grins at Dean to let him know he’s not feeling affectionately cruel at this particular moment, but he’s definitely saving that bit of information for future reference.

Cas unbuttons Dean’s jeans next, pulling them off as Dean lifts his hips, discarding them on the floor. When he’s finished, Cas sits there on his knees with his hands on Dean’s thighs. He waits for Dean to tilt his head up, eyebrow raised in a look that just says, “Well?”

And then Cas is sliding his way up Dean’s body, the movement eliciting a sharp intake of breath. Cas pauses with his knees on either side of Dean’s hips, his elbows on either side of Dean’s shoulders, propping himself up, and stares at Dean calmly -- and then Dean’s hands are in _his_ hair, demanding, closing the space between them, and then they are kissing.

This is not the repulsion of electrons, Cas thinks. This is something else entirely; this is gravity bringing him to earth, pulling him straight towards Dean.

They disconnect from one another only as long as is absolutely necessary to help each other dispose of their boxers, and then Cas is sealing his lips back over Dean’s at the same time he curves his hand around Dean’s cock. When Dean moans into his mouth, the sound resonates through Cas’ body, spreads heat through his chest, his extremities, his groin. He knows, of course, that sound doesn’t actually work that way, but he can’t find it in himself to examine the phenomenon too closely.

Cas strokes Dean slowly at first, uncertain if what he’s doing is correct, but if there’s a disconnect between theory and practice, Dean doesn’t seem to care. Cas pays attention to everything, anyway, to the way Dean gasps and groans, the way Dean’s hands fist in the sheets, the way Dean’s fingers dig into his shoulder blades, the way he thrusts himself up into Cas’ hand. Cas learns as he goes, memorizes every detail.

As the rise and fall of Dean’s chest quickens, Cas stops kissing him to let him breathe, moves to bite gently at Dean’s neck, his chin, to tease Dean’s earlobe with his teeth. He unclenches Dean’s fist from the sheets with his free hand and twines their fingers together, nuzzles his face into the space between Dean’s head and shoulder, taking the time to breathe Dean in. Cas picks up the pace as he notes the way Dean smells of leather and of the road and of every good memory he’s collected so far, the way he tastes of soap and sweat and the humanity Cas has never loved or craved as much as he does in this moment.

Dean arches into him as he comes, eyes closed, shuddering and vulnerable and beautiful, and as soon as he has breath to spare, he whispers Cas’ name with reverence the like of which he’s never heard in any prayer.

Cas’ breath hitches as he keeps their hands locked together, kissing Dean chastely and tenderly as his breathing slows, as he comes back down to earth. Dean unwinds beneath him, taut lines of his body melting into something warm and radiant.

Dean’s eyes stay closed just long enough for Cas to wonder if it’s normal to transition straight into sleep after these sorts of activities, so it catches him by surprise when Dean flashes him a sudden, mischievous grin, reaches his free hand behind Cas’ back and across his waist, and flips him easily onto his back. He must have been wrong about sleeping, he thinks, as Dean takes Cas’ other hand in his so all of their fingers are intertwined, kisses him slowly and deeply.

Cas is already hard, and as Dean traps his cock between their bodies, rotating his hips in a way Cas, for all his knowledge of human anatomy, finds hard to believe is actually physically possible, he thinks he’s never been more happy to be wrong. He wants to convey his gratitude, his elation, but when he opens his mouth, all he manages is a breathy moan. Dean seems to get the message, anyway, if the look of triumph on his face is any indication.

Before long, Cas is making desperate noises into Dean’s mouth, and it’s only when he’s right on the edge that Dean pulls away to look down at him, and Cas just _knows_ he wants to watch the way he’s going to lose control of his facial expression as he comes. That asshole.

“Showoff,” is all Cas manages to mutter before his eyes flutter closed of their own accord and all he can think, absurdly, is that Dean has painted stars across his vision. When Cas’ body stops shuddering and he opens his eyes again, Dean is looking terribly pleased with himself, like he’s proud to have earned this fond accusation.

As Dean rolls onto his side, tugging Cas further onto the bed so they can both lay without their feet hanging over the edge, Cas realizes he’s starting to understand that regardless of the atomic reality, things do touch. Cas knows, as Dean drapes an arm over his chest, rests his chin on his shoulder, that the _way_ they touch matters. He looks at Dean now thinks a million things, but _carbon oxygen hydrogen nitrogen and traces of other elements_ is not one of them; Dean is so much more than that, a myriad of elements both chemical and not, a universe in and of himself. Castiel wants to learn the intricacies of every way they can possibly interact, wants to experience Dean in every way imaginable.

Dean must be thinking something similar, because he looks at Cas very gravely and says, “I think I’m going to need to make another run to the store.”

They fall asleep hopelessly tangled with one another, and if the sheets are itchy and the mattress uncomfortable, neither one of them seems to notice.

\--

Cas wakes late in the evening to find Dean watching him unselfconsciously. Warmth spreads through his chest at the thought, works its way through his features until he’s smiling softly as he pushes his hair back off his forehead.

“Hello, Dean,” he says. It feels right.

“Hey,” Dean says, propping himself up on his elbow. Dean leans over so casually and kisses him, biting playfully at his bottom lip, following with his tongue. Both of their mouths taste terrible, but for some reason Cas doesn’t seem to mind. He doesn’t feel particularly compelled to investigate why this is the case.

They’re still making out when Cas’ stomach rumbles loudly. Dean laughs against his mouth before pulling back to ask, “Hungry?”

It’s Cas’ turn to roll his eyes, but not before pointedly letting his gaze roam the length of Dean’s body. “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

Dean is still grinning as he orders them Chinese food in the nude, as he pulls his clothes on, as he tells Cas he’s going to run to the store quick before the food arrives. Cas allows himself fifteen minutes more in bed, idly tracing the bumps and ridges in his skin, the imprints left where Dean’s ring was pressed into his arm, where the sheets were pressed between them as they slept.

Cas pulls his clothes back on reluctantly. They still don’t feel quite right sitting against his skin, but he forces himself to sit still and wait.

Dean and the delivery guy show up at nearly the same. Dean throws his grocery bag onto the bed unceremoniously as he scribbles a signature onto the receipt, trading his fake credit card number for the food.

They eat in silence, and Cas is torn between focusing on wolfing down his food and focusing on Dean, who’s smiling as he chews. It’s a rare pleasure, seeing Dean smile like that, and he intends to savor it for as long as he can, even if it means being hungry in another hour or two. Dean catches him staring, but he doesn’t ask him to stop, just kicks playfully at Cas’ feet under the table.

Cas knows what’s coming next. He’s watched humanity long enough to understand that, at least, even if he’s a bit lacking in hands-on experience. But it’s here, in this quiet moment, this simple act of sharing space, of sharing a meal, that he thinks he finally understands what people mean when they say they’re happy.

There’s something else there, too, one more thing to be new and unfamiliar; something like everything he’s been feeling from the day he pulled Dean from hell distilled to maximum potency, not like the itch of his clothes but something deeper, and he realizes, finally, that this is what it’s like to _want_.

It must be clear, he thinks -- it must be clear because once they’re finished eating, Cas immediately moves to Dean’s bed; he doesn’t take Dean’s clothing off slowly this time, doesn’t tap into any of his old patience that comes from living a lifetime that spans several millennia. It must be clear because Dean is smiling and running his fingertips across Cas’ chest feather-soft, eliciting a breathless laugh; he’s grabbing at Cas’ ass as he pulls off his jeans, biting at Cas’ inner thigh as he helps him out of his boxers.

Dean continues his playfulness when he finally has Cas naked, wiggling his eyebrows in mock seduction, and for all his months spent complaining about staring and personal space, that’s exactly what he’s doing to Cas now. Cas marvels at the feeling it generates in him, the way something so simple can light such a fire under his skin, and he wonders idly if that’s the effect his intent observation had on Dean all that time. If so, no wonder he was complaining. It’s incredibly distracting.

A gorgeous flush spreads across Dean’s skin as he helps Cas put on a condom, explaining unnecessarily that he’s done it himself a bunch of times but “never helped another dude put one on before,” but Cas doesn’t begrudge him the need for a distraction. The process is awkward and fumbling, but the knowledge that this is a first for both of them more than makes up for it. It’s okay if it’s not magical and perfect because it’s honest and affectionate and all the other things that matter, and Cas knows they’ll get through it together, just like everything else.

They make it all that way -- all their clothes off, condom on, lube in hand -- they make it there laughing and affectionate and easy, and it’s all so goddamn _fun_ that if Cas didn’t know Dean as well as he does, he might have missed it. Dean doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even pause, just keeps moving his hands over Cas’ body and pressing kisses to the side of his neck and scraping his teeth gently against his shoulders, but it doesn’t matter if he closes his eyes and presses his face against Cas’ hair because Cas can see the doubt and the fear written in the smallest tremble of his hands, the slightest hitch in his breath.

Cas takes Dean’s hands in his own, urges him gently to stop for a minute, just stop, waits for Dean to look at him and then asks him what’s wrong; he thinks he knows, but he knows it’s important for Dean to voice it, to get it in the open and acknowledge and understand it himself.

“It’s just, I...I’ve never had something like,” Dean starts, voice trembling slightly, “like _this_ before.” He looks at Cas then, something in his glance imploring Cas to understand what he means by that vague description, and Cas takes some small comfort in the fact that Dean looks at least marginally relieved when he realizes Cas gets it. And of course Cas gets it, this thing that’s a first for him, too -- this, all of this, a relationship based on something more than just mutual attraction, spanning more than just a few hours or days or weeks, something so real and substantial and important. He understands how difficult it is to put it into words -- this shared life where they hunt together and eat together and sleep together and weather the apocalypse together, this relationship defined by mutual respect and trust but also this playful antagonism that makes it seem like maybe everything is okay, even if the world is ending, that makes it feel like even though they’re both terrified of how wonderful and good and huge this is that they can still manage it, that maybe it can become a defining part of their shared life.

Dean takes a deep breath, tries for a smile but can’t quite make it work. “Maybe we could just...I dunno. Just go back to the way things were before and everything will be okay.”

“Is that what you want?” Cas asks, seriously, because he would do that for Dean. He would do _anything_ for Dean.

“No,” Dean says, to Cas’ relief. “I want--” he continues, and his voice catches on the phrase, stumbles over it from so many years of disuse-- “I want this to work out. I don’t want to screw it up.”

“Oh, Dean,” Cas says, hands on the sides of Dean’s face, thumbs running over Dean’s cheekbones. “I can’t promise you everything will be okay,” Cas says. “You may not have noticed, but we’re kind of in the middle of a minor apocalypse.” Dean looks up at that, quirks a smile involuntarily. Cas smiles, too, the new one he has that reaches across his whole face and lights up his eyes in a way his grace never did -- he’s seen it in the mirror, the way it makes him look almost indistinguishable from what he was before.

“I want this, too,” Cas breathes, and he thinks it might be the most sincere thing he’s ever said -- of all the things he could choose to do with his newfound free will, this is the thing he wants more than anything. “Have faith.”

“I’ll try,” Dean says, but the waver in his voice is gone. Cas knows the uncertainty and the doubt aren’t going to disappear overnight, but he’s willing to wait.

What follows is unlike anything Cas has ever experienced before, almost like worship, and he’s heard prayers before, but he’s never experienced one quite like this, one where Dean says his name in whispers and gasps and groans: salutation, supplication, thanksgiving.

Cas already knows Dean intimately, but he goes slowly at first, wanting to get it right. It’s a little awkward, still, the sounds and the sensations new and unfamiliar but not unpleasant, and Cas keeps a steady rhythm once he finds the right angle to make Dean gasp and groan.

Something builds in Cas, warmth that starts where their bodies connect and spreads to every one of his nerve endings as he takes them both closer and closer to the edge, pausing periodically to draw it out, this sweet torture. Cas knows how close Dean is to the edge in the way he’s trembling and breathing erratically, and the next time he comes to a temporary stop, both of them so close to falling apart, he ghosts his lips across the edge of Dean’s mouth and whispers, “Ready?”

Dean is nodding desperately one second and the next he’s wrapping his hand around himself as Cas resumes, both of their movements quick and erratic. They come within seconds of one another, clinging to one another, collapsing into one another.

“Cas,” Dean murmurs, when they’re finished and laying tangled together, and Cas has never heard a sweeter _amen_.

“Dean,” Cas responds, smiling at him softly, answering his prayer even if it’s sacrilege because Dean deserves it, deserves everything.

Cas knows, now, for certain, that he’s lost forever that sense of things existing as millions of constituent parts, that falling has wiped so many details from the way he understands the world. In some way, though, everything has become more real; just like that, touch has suddenly become not just a physical reality but a necessity on some other level entirely. He may technically be less than what he was, but if that’s what he had to give up to understand that two people _can_ get to the core of one another, so be it.

Cas may not be able to read Dean’s mind any more, but it’s enough that Dean looks affectionately bemused as he rolls onto his side to kiss Cas on his jaw.

“You’ve fallen in every way imaginable,” Dean breathes onto the skin of Castiel’s neck, and Cas can feel the laughter in it, in the way his words come out adoring rather than biting, in the way Dean’s chest vibrates slightly beneath his fingers.

Dean is smiling like those years in hell didn’t happen, like his brother is alive and well somewhere, like Castiel is his world as much as Dean is his, and it’s worth it, it’s worth it, it’s worth it.

\--

It takes hours for them to get out of bed, and when they do, it’s only because their skin is sticking together at every point they touch. Apparently there’s a limit even to how much of certain sensations Dean can handle, despite having decades to acclimate.

“You’re a mess,” Dean says, giving Cas a lingering once-over that suggests he doesn’t consider this much of an actual problem.

Cas returns the favor, quirking an eyebrow. “Look who’s talking.”

They find the solution in the shower, and if it takes them forever to clean each other up with the cheap hotel soap and the crappy water pressure, to rub themselves dry with thin and scratchy towels, neither really seems to mind.

When they finally finish in the bathroom, Cas stands staring distastefully at his rumpled clothes until Dean offers some of his own: faded jeans, soft flannel, broken-in boots. Cas gets dressed and surveys himself in the mirror, notes the pleasant feel of the lived-in clothing against his skin, breathes in a little bit of Dean with each inhalation. He nods in satisfaction.

He thinks perhaps he’ll wear Dean’s clothes for the rest of his life.


	4. 2011

Cas catches the flu.

He was pretty sure he had run the whole gamut of human experience already, but it turns out he was mistaken. He’d experienced pain and heat and heartbreak. Hell, he’d even experienced death. But the slow torture of illness is something entirely new, and if he thought he hated certain parts of being human before, he realizes now they were just the precursor to this.

He tries to think about it logically in a desperate attempt to reason away his discomfort. Some increasingly unreachable part of himself realizes being sick has come as such a huge shock to him because he hadn’t grown up with this, hadn’t had years of runny noses, of sore throats and fevers and headaches, of “something’s going around.” His vessel may have some sort of muscle memory for this sort of thing, but Cas certainly doesn’t, and anything Jimmy may have been used to certainly isn’t helping Cas now.

The first day he’s in denial, thinking the tickle in his throat is just a fluke because, after all, what else would it be? By day two, though, he’s absolutely miserable, breathing irritably through his mouth as his temperature rises and his entire body aches. He doesn’t know how to distract himself from his symptoms, so he spends the entire day grumbling about the fact that his nose won’t stop running, that his throat itches incessantly, that his sinuses are blocked and he can’t taste anything he eats except for the disgusting menthol cough drops that only bring him temporary relief.

Dean, as usual, is endlessly amused with Cas’ reactions to ordinary experiences, though he at least manages to temper his amusement with gentleness. Mercifully, he declares they could use a break from hunting anyway. They stop at the least crappy motel they can find, and Dean forces Cas to choke down some nyquil and lulls him to sleep with a backrub and assurances that this whole ordeal will be over before he knows it.

When he wakes the next day feeling worse than ever, Cas seriously begins to doubt this promise. Still, as Dean explains the timeline his illness will likely take, as he lets Cas sleep in and brings him tissues and orders them food and kisses him anyway at what is most certainly great personal risk, Cas is pretty sure the whole experience could have been a lot, lot worse.

They’re in the middle of Episode IV of something called Star Wars (“Wouldn’t it make more sense to start with Episode I?” Cas had asked, squinting suspiciously. Dean had taken on a carefully neutral expression and offered a terse “No” as the only explanation.) when Cas is reminded of Dean’s memories he used to sift through as a guilty pleasure: Dean taking care of Sam when he was little, Dean helping with the younger kids during his brief stint at the boys’ home as a teenager, Dean unconsciously gravitating towards hunts where the victims are children, Dean being good with kids even to this day.

The thought makes Cas smile in spite of his current state, and when Dean notices and comments that Cas “must really be enjoying the movie, huh?”, he looks so pleased that Cas just nods instead of explaining.

Cas is alternately too hot or too cold, his chest hurts, his throat itches, and his primary function seems to have become the manufacture of mucous, but he’s pretty sure this is still one of the best weeks of his life.

\--

Cas supposes it was inevitable, but he wishes it had taken longer all the same.

They’re not even on a hunt when it happens. Instead, they’re in a run-down little town in the middle of nowhere, Colorado, stopping at the only available gas station. Something about the place feels off to Cas, but he doesn’t say anything. The government is running damage control as best it can, but they already know well enough to avoid the big cities as best _they_ can.

They go inside the tiny building to grab some snacks while the gas is pumping, and Cas inhales sharply as he glances at the employee leaning against the counter. “ _Dean_ ,” he whispers insistently, at the exact moment the cashier drawls a “Well look who it is.”

Dean snaps to attention immediately. “Excuse me?” he says; demanding, not asking.

The guy just smirks as his eyes flick to black. “What, you didn’t know?” the demon asks, tone patronizing, voice dripping with mock pity. “Poor little Sammy finally couldn’t take it any more. I hear Lucifer is loving the new arrangement. Can’t say the same for your brother.”

Before Cas can even _think_ one of the expletives he’s become increasingly fond of, Dean has pulled Ruby’s knife from his jacket and vaulted over the counter, burying it to the hilt in the demon’s chest, fury outweighing his desire for more information. Cas can’t really blame him, given the situation.

A few months ago Cas may have been able to prevent it, but nowadays humans and demons all wear the same faces. He’s not sure he would have wanted to, anyway. If he thought he felt guilty before about his lie by omission, it’s nothing to the guilt and grief and sadness he feels now, looking at the hurt and anger on Dean’s face as he pulls the blade free and turns back towards Cas.

Dean wipes the knife on his jeans, keeping his gaze averted as he asks, voice low and dangerous, exactly what Cas feared: “Did you know?”

Cas swallows hard, but it fails to keep his stomach from flipping, making him feel as though he’s falling all over again. “Yes,” he says anyway, and then, “I’m sorry,” even though he knows how useless the words are. Cas has felt regret before, has known he’s made mistakes and seen too late how they could have been avoided, but now he’s feeling it as something physical, shame making his face burn and his insides twist, and something about that makes it so, so much worse.

Dean looks at him, then, and Cas wonders for an instant if Dean is going to hit him. Lord knows he deserves it. Instead, Dean exhales slowly and scrubs a hand over his face. When he takes it away, he just looks tired.

“It’s why you fell, isn’t it?” Dean asks, and Cas wonders how broken he must look, to have caused Dean’s rage to fade so quickly.

He just looks at the ground and nods, and when Dean doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything further, Cas chooses his next words carefully as he manages to ask, “So what do we do now?” He phrases it intentionally, wants Dean to understand that they’re a unit, that he’ll follow Dean anywhere, to the end of the world if that’s what it takes to make it up to him.

“We fix it,” Dean says, and Cas knows he gets it, hears the relief in his voice at the fact Cas has saved him the trouble of asking the question that it wouldn’t have been fair of him to ask anyone.

Cas looks at Dean, this time, as he nods.

\--

They have dinner in a dingy, dimly lit bar in the outskirts of the slightly larger town, and the few hours it takes them to get there hasn’t managed to take the edge off the evening. They’re served greasy, overcooked hamburgers on stale buns, but it doesn’t matter much since neither of them seems to have much of an appetite, anyway.

It’s nearing midnight when Cas learns for himself that bad beer goes down easier than bad food once you get past the shock of the first few sips. Two drinks in and he’s drunk for the first time, and that _does_ take the edge off. It makes Dean’s laughter seem a little less strained, blurs his vision just enough that he can’t quite be sure he’s seeing the hurt he knows Dean is trying to hide. He thinks some other time he might have found it truly enjoyable, might have liked the way the alcohol makes it seem like everything has a pleasant ring to it. Instead, the pleasant facade just makes him sad, makes him already nostalgic over the happiness he’s so recently found.

Dean drags him out of the bar near closing, and they get in the Impala and drive, having reached some unspoken decision not to bother getting a room. A song comes on the radio where they’re rattling off the words too fast for Cas to understand, but smiles wryly as he catches a piece of the chorus: _it’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine_. Dean barks out a laugh, swallows hard and tightens his grip on the steering wheel. Cas realizes Dean is trying not to cry, but he doesn’t know how to fix this, doesn’t know how to help, doesn’t know what to do besides offer whatever is left of himself, small consolation though it may be.

Cas ends up dozing off in the passenger seat, an image of Dean driving through the night with his jaw set and his knuckles white against the steering wheel so bright in his mind he feels it’s been burned into his memory forever.

He wishes circumstances were different.

\--

By the time Cas wakes up, plenty hungover and hurting in more ways than one, they’re just passing a sign that announces they’re 66 miles from Sioux Falls. Dean is squinting into the sunlight streaming in through the windshield, and for a second, Cas doesn’t notice the dark circles under his eyes. Cas groans involuntarily as he sits up, shielding his eyes from the gorgeous sunrise, that cruel reminder that even as their world crumbles around them, life goes on.

“Bobby will know where to start,” Dean says. Any other day, Cas would have grumbled a “well good morning to you, too,” but not this time. This time, Cas knows what Dean is really saying is “Bobby will know what to do.” He knows Dean is heading to Bobby’s because he’s feeling lost, because Bobby is both a source of knowledge and a source of comfort, an anchor to his life before the apocalypse. An anchor to _their_ lives before the apocalypse.

“Want me to drive?” Cas offers, a force of habit more than anything. Dean just shakes his head in response, jaw clenching, but after a minute he reaches over to take Cas’ hand in his own. Dean grips so tight it’s just on the wrong edge of painful, but Cas endures.

When they arrive at Bobby’s house, they can hear him grumbling all the way to the door, but his complaints die immediately when he sees the look of them as they stand on his porch. He ushers them inside silently, and it’s only after they’re situated on the couch with fresh cups of coffee steaming in their hands that Bobby saves them the trouble of speaking and asks, “What’s wrong?” There’s something in his voice, though, some sort of tired resignation that tells Cas they’re not about to give him much of a surprise. Not when they showed up without Sam; not when news they’d rather avoid is constantly in their periphery, the unavoidable play-by-play of the end of the world.

Cas explains it, then, the whole sad situation, filling in the holes in what Dean and Bobby already know. It’s the least he can do, but he glares at the ground as he explains what happened to Sam, hands balled into fists against his knees, fingernails digging into his palms, furious with himself. When he finishes, he waits for them to be furious with him, too.

Instead, Bobby just curses before moving around the coffee table to pull both Dean and Cas into a rough hug. “Idjits,” he says, but there’s no anger in it; just exasperation. Understanding. It makes Cas feel a little less like things are falling apart, somehow.

“What do we do?” Dean asks, and his voice breaks a little just before he can finish getting the question out.

Bobby sighs, shakes his head. “I’ll look into it,” he says, “but this isn’t anything I’ve handled before. Hell, this isn’t something _anyone_ has handled before. Stopping the devil, averting the apocalypse...This is above even my pay grade, boys.”

Dean swallows hard. “And if Lucifer can’t be...I mean, if Sam--”

“I don’t know,” Bobby says, sparing Dean the burden of finishing the question. “More than one way to stop near anything, I suppose, but this is a whole ‘nother ballgame. Might be there isn’t any way to get rid of the devil, peacefully or...otherwise. It’s possible--”

“Enough with the disclaimers,” Dean snaps. “What’s our plan B?”

“The Colt,” Bobby offers, and Dean goes still.

“Is that even going to work?” Dean asks, and when Bobby shrugs and looks to Cas, Dean turns, redirects his question. “ _Is_ it going to work?”

Cas freezes for a second, then, because he’s pretty sure he knows the answer, but Dean is looking at him in this pleading way and he can’t say it. He _can’t_. Instead of a coherent sentence, what he says is, “I--I don’t--”

“You don’t _what_?” Dean asks, more demanding. “If you’re about to tell me you don’t _think_ so, you better be damn sure.”

For a moment, Cas foolishly wonders why it’s so important to Dean, selfishly wants to know why he can’t just let it go, why they can’t just go on with their lives and do their best to forget the world is falling apart. In the next moment, though, he makes the mistake of practicing empathy, that uniquely human feature, and he thinks of Sam; not Sam the abomination, but Sam as Cas saw him in those last days, Sam as Dean must have seen him as he carried him from their burning home, as he told him not to be afraid of the dark because their father was the hero who killed the monsters hiding there, as he looked at his report cards and made him food and helped him study. He thinks of Dean, never really ready to let Sam go but always wishing his little brother could have something more, something else than being trapped in this life. He thinks of Sam, a prisoner in his own mind with only Lucifer for company, and he understands and it aches, it aches more than his hangover and his tired human bones.

So Cas thinks on it, thinks long and hard because he wants to comfort Dean, wants to tell him what he wants to hear, but not as much as he doesn’t want to lie to him. Cas knows that there are things the Colt won’t work on, things that take refuge in the dark corners of an edgeless universe, things he can’t name because humans have no words for them. But the devil existed before the Colt existed, and no matter how serious Cas’ doubts, the fact remains that no one has ever tried to use the Colt on his brother. He knows it won’t work 99% of the way, but he doesn’t know for _sure_. The one thing he does know, though, is he isn’t quite ready to give up hope just yet.

“No, I’m not sure. I don’t know.” Cas spreads his hands wide, pleading. “There’s no precedent. It might work. It might not. I just don’t know.” It’s the truth, but it leaves a bad taste in his mouth all the same.

Bobby doesn’t seem nearly as perturbed, comfortable in his pragmatism. “You have a better idea?” Bobby asks, but there’s no heat in it, and Cas thinks maybe he doesn’t have it in him to be hopeless just yet, doesn’t have it in him to picture Dean taking that gun to his brother, either.

“Finding it’ll take some doing,” Bobby says, and Dean just nods, sets his shoulders.

“What do we do til then?” Dean asks.

Bobby shrugs. “Survive.”

\--

It takes Bobby only half a day of silent research and terse phone calls to determine it’s getting him nowhere. It isn’t even dark before they’re back on the road, Cas driving the Impala with Dean in the passenger seat, Bobby trailing behind them in what he affectionately referred to as “the best junker I’ve got.”

They check into a motel in the middle of the night. When Dean hands Bobby a separate set of keys, looking more than just a little apprehensive, but Bobby just shrugs and says, “Well it’s about damn time” before making his way to his room.

Dean’s relief is palpable, and Cas thinks that even in the midst of the apocalypse, there are still things to be grateful for. Before he can stop himself, he says a silent prayer of thanks that Bobby Singer turned out to be a better father than John Winchester ever managed.

Another part of Cas is still waiting for Dean’s reaction to his narrative about Sam, though. But they get ready for bed and when they lay down Dean presses his chest against Cas’ back, snakes his arm across Cas’ chest, and whispers into his hair, over and over, that it’s okay, it’s okay, there isn’t anything he could have done, there isn’t anything anyone could have done. Cas tries to have faith, he really does, but he can’t help but wonder who Dean is trying to convince.

It’s the last thing Cas hears before he falls asleep. He sees Sam in his dreams, his mind kind enough to conjure him up an image of Sam as he was, tired and lonely and desperate but never without hope, and cruel enough to shift it into Sam as he is, all calm, self-righteous certainty that is not his own. Sam’s face shifts from one to the other, an endless loop that reminds Cas of his failure over and over until he wakes.


	5. 2012

They spend the next few months following whatever leads they can find on the Colt. They hunt and save people along the way, doing as much good as they can, never feeling like it’s enough. They drive day in and day out and still feel like they’re going nowhere, and their patience with the road and with each other wears ever thinner.

As the months drag on, it becomes progressively more difficult to find places to stay that are open or safe. They become so unused to pulling into pristine, well-lit towns that on the days where they actually do, it feels surreal, like a trip back in time. Some cities are still in the midst of their deterioration, but in an ever-increasing number, others are in full-blown chaos or decay or paranoia or, if they’re really lucky, all three. There are quarantined areas that seem to pop up almost overnight, places surrounded by barbed-wire fences where the insides look more like battlegrounds than the residential sections or bustling downtowns they used to be. There are bodies on the streets and holes in the buildings, graffiti scrawled in blood and ink announcing the end.

When they find cities where there are still a few brave souls making sure the news keeps broadcasting or the newspapers stay in circulation, they hear of bombs dropping, of supplies running thin, of humanity warring against itself in the struggle to survive. They make the transition to the new life almost frighteningly easily, their already gray morality shifting just a few shades darker as they cheat and steal. They prioritize their survival over the health of the economy, and it’s really nothing out of the ordinary; not for them, not for the world.

“At least things can’t get much worse,” Dean quips, but they wonder.

It winds up being Bobby’s suggestion to set up a home base, and that’s how Camp Chitaqua is formed. They start out welcoming people at first, thinking they can save more by establishing a safe haven rather than traveling the country and saving scattered individuals. After all, Bobby reasons, he’s always been at his best behind the scenes, providing backup in the best way he knows how. “And anyway,” he says, “I don’t know how much longer these old bones can deal with bumping along the road. Or how much longer this old _everything_ can stand having only you two bumpkins for company.” Dean and Cas both give him their best unimpressed stares, but truth be told, they’re both tired of this vantage point, this traveling home that allows them the unique advantage of being able to watch the entire country fall apart a little piece at a time.

They wind up at a place in the woods, a little group of cabins just dusty enough they figure the owners aren’t going to show up on the doorstep. It’s just far enough from the surrounding towns to be inconvenient; in other words, just far enough they feel some semblance of safety, no matter how illusory it may be. At any rate, it’s quiet enough they’ll be able to hear damn near anything approaching and homey enough they don’t feel lost, so they figure it’s as good a place as any, and definitely better than some.

Dean and Cas settle into a cabin together, and when the first survivors start arriving, no one questions it. It’s just the way things are, and they have bigger things to worry about nowadays. Cas will never admit it to anyone out loud, not with so much suffering he knows is present even if they’ve managed to put a buffer between it and themselves, but he loves it, the way they fit so easily into each others’ lives in spite of everything.

\--

They settle into a routine, trying to maintain some semblance of a life. Hunting the monster of the week and searching for the Colt gradually give way to the more pragmatic concerns of what has become their daily grind: Hunting for food when they can and raiding when they can’t, when it’s the wrong season or they need something bullets can’t buy, toilet paper or medicine or clothing.

It’s still the apocalypse, but it’s become mundane, and Cas marvels at humanity’s ability to adapt until it occurs to him he’s adapting, too.

It’s harder to quantify than a simple _I am this when once I was that_. He wants to say he was more and now he is less, and it’s almost true, except that he’s less comet-in-a-bottle but more organic, more ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

He can’t pinpoint the exact moment when he completes the transition. All he knows is that one moment he’s walking next to Dean and the next he’s on the ground, tears in the knees of his jeans, skin scraped from his palms. All he knows is that his legs have failed him for the first time. _His legs_ , he thinks, not _borrowed legs_ , and there’s the rub.

“Hey man, you all right?” Dean is asking, and Cas is already back on his feet ( _his_ feet), and no, he really isn’t. He feels, in fact, like he’s dying.

Fear washes over him in a wave, and he recognizes, distantly, it serves no rational or useful purpose, but he can’t stop it from happening. He looks down at his bleeding hands and watches them tremble, feels his heart racing, feels himself breathing too quickly, feels powerless to stop any of it. Cas knows what it is, knows what’s happening because he knows humanity well enough, but realizing he’s panicking and actually _stopping_ himself from panicking are such very, very different things. The awareness that once may have been comforting just makes the situation worse, makes him acutely aware that no matter how much he tries to rationalize the situation, he can’t seem to control it, can’t seem to control _himself_.

Cas has just the presence of mind to realize how heartbreaking it is that Dean remains calm, seems to know exactly what to do through the whole ordeal. Dean has Cas sit on the ground, both of them cross-legged, knees barely touching. He holds Cas’ hands in his own, rubs his thumbs in small circles on the backs of his palms, tells him to focus on breathing deep and slow. Dean tells him “It’s okay” over and over, quietly, gently, and waits with him until it actually is.

Cas’ hands have stopped shaking by the time they get back to camp, but he feels like he’s trembling in some other way, some way that’s bone-deep and incurable. Dean must see it, because he opens the car door for Cas and takes him by the hand, leading him into their shared space. Dean strips them both down slowly and gently, kisses Cas reverently, holds Cas’ hands in his own and rocks into him, smooth and steady and familiar.

Afterwards, Cas lays with his head on Dean’s shoulder, face pressed into his neck. He doesn’t feel like Dean has managed to fix whatever’s broken in him, but he feels a little less desperate, a little more grounded. “It’s okay,” Dean whispers, and it is, it really is, even if just for now.

Life goes on.

\--

Chuck shows up in the middle of winter.

There's a foot of snow on the ground and they have better things to use the generator for than heat, so Dean and Cas are curled up together in bed despite the fact it’s the middle of the afternoon. Truth be told, there’s a good chance they’d be there regardless of the weather, but the shared heat doesn't hurt.

A knock at the door of the cabin wakes them from their half-sleep. A voice shouting "Mind if I come in?" rouses them the rest of the way, but before either of them has a chance to respond, the door is opening and footsteps are echoing across the floorboards and then Chuck is shivering in their entryway.

Cas is so shocked to see him here that he doesn't even have time to wonder if Chuck is shocked to see them here, together, like this. Dean is a little quicker on the draw.

“Dude, what the hell. What's even the point of knocking if you're just going to burst in like that?”

“Sorry,” Chuck says, and to his credit, he does look apologetic. Then again, if Cas is remembering correctly, he always looks sort of apologetic. “I knew you were going to let me in, anyway, so I figured, you know, why wait out in the cold?”

That's when Cas notices Chuck is standing there in pajama pants and a ratty bathrobe, his scuffed boots and faded mittens little more than cursory acknowledgements of the season.

“You knew we'd let you in, but you came here in…” Dean gestures at all of Chuck, from his dripping hair to the snow melting around his boots, “...this?”

Chuck just shrugs. “I'm good at seeing the future. Still working on being good at planning for it.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dean says, scrubbing a hand across his face.

“God,” Chuck says. “Cruel and capricious, remember? Here to warn you of the impending toilet paper apocalypse I've concocted and help you delay it if I can.”

“Well, bursting in with no warning, certainly a dad sort of thing to do,” Dean says, rolling his eyes. “Just turn around." He gives Cas a long-suffering look as he rolls out of bed and pulls on some pants.

Chuck is funnier than Cas remembers. The whole situation is hilarious, actually -- him and Dean, talking to God in the nude. There's a good parallel here, a joke he would make if he had just a little more practice with execution. Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. He finally gets that one. Hilarious, except this is no Eden.

“Let's keep him,” Cas says, instead. Dean raises an eyebrow, but he doesn’t object. Friends are in increasingly short supply these days, even the weird ones.

From then on, Camp Chitaqua has a quartermaster.

\--

They’re on a supply run when it happens.

As soon as he realizes what’s going on, Cas curses under his breath. Before, he would have _known_ , would have felt them coming from a mile away, but this time -- nothing. Not even a bad vibe, a sense of unease to warn him of the ambush.

The demons are on them in seconds, and the Cas that was never would have let this happen. Damn near all of who he was is gone, though, and so here he is, and here they are.

Cas fights off the first couple with ease, and he’s thankful that even though he may be weaker than he was, at least in his muscle memory he’s still a soldier. At least months or years of humanity haven’t erased millennia of his existence from the very fabric of who he is, and at least the anti-possession tattoo protects him from things his absent grace no longer can. He’s starting to feel stupidly, outrageously optimistic, and even _that_ doesn’t set off any alarm bells.

Cas turns mid-fight, goes to say something snarky about demons becoming complacent now that their creator walks the earth, but as soon as he catches sight of Dean, his words die on his lips.

Maybe a dozen feet away, several other demons lay dead by Dean’s hand, but another has Dean pinned to the floor, hands around his throat. In the split second before Cas is forced to return his attention to his own fight, he can see the glee on its face, see the delight it’s taking in watching Dean struggle uselessly as it hisses, “Remember me?” Just a few feet away. Just a few feet out of reach.

By the time Cas sinks his blade into the last demon, Dean has stopped struggling.

“Dean!” Cas is shouting, and then he doesn’t know quite how it happened but the demon that was on top of Dean is on the ground with a blade in his chest and he’s shaking Dean, commanding him to get up, but his eyes are rolled back into his head and his lips are an exquisite shade of pale blue and he’s not breathing and oh god, oh god, oh god.

He should know what to do in this situation, he should know, he knows he should know. Words flash through his head -- _asphyxia, hypoxia, ventricular fibrillation, cardiopulmonary resuscitation_ \-- but when it comes to an actual solution, his mind is completely, terrifyingly blank, the ideas divorced from their execution by his blind panic. His thoughts are moving too quickly for him to follow, the bits and pieces he manages to linger on useless scraps that do nothing to help the situation: 911 was a convenience in a world without an apocalypse on its hands and if Dean dies this time no one is going to bring him back and this is all up to _him_ and oh god.

Cas’ hands are shaking so badly he can barely hold his phone and thank god he has Bobby on speed dial and it rings once, twice, three times and he’s still repeating “Pick up pick up Bobby pick _up_ ” when he hears a confused, concerned “Cas?” from the other end of the line.

“Bobby!” he practically shouts, and he’s explaining the situation as fast as he can and the only indication he gets of how Bobby is feeling is a sharp intake of breath and then Bobby is telling him to slow down but he can’t, he _can’t_ , he needs to _do something_. He’s pacing, free hand tangled in his hair so tight it hurts, and that’s just enough to focus on that he finally starts to process what Bobby is saying.

Bobby is a calming presence even from miles away, even in this fucked-up situation, and in a steady voice he’s telling Cas how to check for a pulse. Cas pulls his hand from his hair and presses his fingers to Dean’s neck, and the rhythm of Dean’s blood moving through his veins is faint and slow, but it’s _there_. He relays this finding to Bobby. “Okay, that’s good,” Bobby says smoothly, as though trying not to startle Cas with the news. “That’s a good sign. Listen to me, you hear? It’s going to be okay.” Cas realizes, distantly, that Bobby can’t possibly know that, but it feels good to hear it, anyway. Keeps him on the right side of his terror.

Bobby tells Cas how to do rescue breathing, and part of him wants to freeze in place at the thought of putting down the phone, but another part tells him that if he can fight and kill to keep himself alive then he can do this for Dean, he can do this, and it’s the latter that mercifully, miraculously wins out.

Once his mind has made itself up, he moves almost automatically to follow Bobby’s instructions. He breathes for Dean, keeping up an internal mantra of _pleasepleaseplease_ as he tries to count out the seconds, to keep a rhythm, to exercise control he doesn’t feel, to prevent himself from panicking as one breath turns into two turns into ten. On the fourteenth, though, Dean’s eyes close as he gasps, taking in a shaky breath on his own, and it’s the most wonderful thing Cas has ever heard.

Dean doesn’t regain consciousness, but Cas is giddy with relief, dizzy with it, high on it. In his elation, the frantic counterpoint to his earlier dismay, he barely remembers to pick back up the phone. “You were right,” he manages, shakily. “It’s going to be okay, Dean’s going to be okay. We’re on our way back to camp.” The clear plan of action steadies him a bit, plasters over his frenzied relief with calm pragmatism.

Cas’ admiration of Bobby only grows when he hears his sigh of relief from the other end of the line and realizes what the situation must have seemed like from his vantage point, knowing one of the only remaining people he considers family was dying and the other was relying on him to help save the day from miles and miles away, his voice his only tool. “Drive safe, you hear?” Bobby says gruffly, and Cas hears all of the love in it.

Cas drags Dean bodily to the car, swearing the whole way, breathing hard by the time he shoves Dean into the passenger seat. Despite Bobby’s anxious request, Cas drives the entire way back to camp with one hand on the wheel and the other, always, on Dean -- on his chest, on the back of his neck, holding his hand. He’s turning away from the road constantly just to make sure Dean is still breathing, but he can’t help himself in spite of the added danger.

Even after they get back to camp, Cas stays awake next to Dean all night, watches him breathe, watches bruises spread across his neck. When Dean wakes the next morning, he croaks out a “Hey, angel.”

Cas tries not to look stricken and isn’t quite sure he succeeds, but his relief is so great that he responds with a gentle admonition. “Dean,” he says, “you know I’m not--”

Dean waves his hand in a dismissive gesture, as if rejecting the very idea that Cas has become anything less than magical.

“You brought me back, didn’t you?” Dean says, and well, Cas doesn’t really want to argue with that.

\--

A few evenings later, in a moment a little too quiet for comfort, it occurs to Cas that just because he got it right this one time, managed to save Dean in this particular instance even though he can’t heal wounds or stop bullets, doesn’t mean the same will hold true forever. Once his brain latches on to this idea, he can’t seem to shake it.

Cas spends an inordinate number of his waking hours unintentionally imagining all the ways he might fail, all the ways Dean might die, and he wants to stop thinking of it more than anything but he can’t, he can’t, he can’t.

\--

Chuck is only six months into his tenure as quartermaster before the job starts taking its toll.

He admits it one day when the three of them are planning a supply run, pulling out some convoluted chart Cas doesn’t feel particularly compelled to try and understand. There’s only eleven of them in the camp, but already the rationing is stirring up discontent. Turns out people don’t much appreciate having to limit things like food and medicine and toilet paper. Especially toilet paper. They’re going to have to keep going farther and farther out to find what they need, and with the way things in the world are going -- well, no one really wants that.

They can’t help hearing about it, though, as people trickle in with their horror stories; can’t help seeing it when they go on raids. Can’t help caring as they begin to make friends with the people who settle down in the camp instead of just passing through, people who often have nowhere else to go and little else to lose. It looks like it pains him to say it, but Dean grits out the words, anyway: They need to try harder, to make more of an effort to find the Colt and put a stop to this, because they owe it to their friends and to the world and to themselves.

This sounds simple and agreeable enough to Cas until he understands the extent of what Dean was saying.

There may be other ways of getting information, but there’s no question the quickest and the most direct is by obtaining it from Lucifer’s own creations. Cas isn’t surprised when they refuse to offer it willingly, though. If he’s honest, the way they change their minds when Dean starts working on them doesn’t really surprise him, either.

The first time Dean assembles tools Cas knows he hoped he would never again have to use and then puts to the test all the hell-earned skills he wished he had forgotten, he doesn’t eat for the rest of the day. Nonetheless, he spends half the night puking his guts out and half the week waking screaming from his sleep.

Cas tries his best to comfort Dean, but there’s no fixing that, no erasing hell from his memory when every time he picks up that blade it’s a fresh reminder.

Doesn’t stop him from continuing, though.

\--

Cas confronts Dean about it, eventually. He ignores the fact Dean won’t meet his eyes and pleads with him to stop, to realize what it’s doing to him, to realize it isn’t worth it.

Dean just sighs. “What choice do I have, Cas?”

He doesn’t have an answer to that, and he hates it. He wants to offer up some easy solution, something that will absolve them both of their guilt over Sam, something that will solve all their problems in one fell swoop, and he knows he can’t.

Cas knows the emotional toll the torturing is having on Dean, knows it not just from the things Dean admits in the rare moments he allows himself to be vulnerable and honest, but from the expression on his face as he sleeps, from the duration of his smiles and subtle changes in his mood. Sometimes, though, he swears he can even see the effect the torturing is having on Dean as though it’s a physical thing, swirling under his skin and behind his eyes.

He’s sure he’s imagining it. Pretty sure.

\--

Dean keeps around all of his phones. Some of them ring; Cas knows these phones. He has their numbers in his own phone, and in case something happens to that, he also keeps them in his memory. So he knows some of them are just older models that Dean has kept around despite upgrading long ago, and when he asks Dean why, Dean just responds, simply, “Backup.”

Dean has kept every phone he has ever owned. They’re a catalog of his life, each one containing a random assortment of pictures, a small sample from the archives. Some of them are of the Impala or scenery or people they’ve helped, but there’s a definite trend amongst those Dean has decided to keep: Sam asleep in the car with a plastic spoon in his mouth. Sam kissing Sarah Blake in a promise he means but won’t keep. Sam in the driver’s seat, gaze distant, mind elsewhere. Sam covered in glitter, face contorted in mock horror. Hundreds of fleeting images of who his brother used to be.

Dean looks at them when he thinks Cas won’t notice, but if there’s one thing Cas is good for nowadays, it’s noticing things about Dean.

There are pictures of Dean, too, in faded hard copy. Cas finds one by chance while digging through the back of the Impala: Dean younger, happier, set against a background of fireworks that creates an aura around him, a haze of light that seems to radiate from his skin. Cas smiles as he examines it, thumb absentmindedly running over the creases as he memorizes every detail, and then Dean is calling to him and he’s leaving it on top of the jumbled mess of weapons, closing the trunk.

When they get back, Dean sees it, picks it up with a frown. It takes Cas a minute to place the look, but this is what it is: the unconscious turning down of the mouth, the knitting of the brows that occurs in the space before you remember the person who goes with the face. It breaks his fucking heart to imagine what Dean must think he’s becoming.

When they lay down that night, Cas takes Dean’s hands in his own and rubs each joint between thumb and forefinger. He traces the contours of Dean’s face, brushes over lips and eyebrows and earlobes. He runs deft fingers through Dean’s hair, across the back of his neck; kisses him on the top of his head, the corner of his mouth; touches him in dozens of places but always gently, reverently.

“Hey Cas, what gives?” Dean asks, not really expecting a response. The way he leans into ever touch is answer enough. “You spoil me,” Dean says with the ghost of a smile, muscles already relaxing, mind drifting.

Cas waits a heartbeat, two, three. “I’m sorry,” he says, uselessly.

“What for?” Dean asks, but it’s reflex more than anything, and a few seconds later, he’s asleep with Cas draped around him like a lifeline.

“You still look like that,” Cas murmurs to Dean’s unconscious form. “Like fireworks on a dark night. But I can’t make you see it. I’m sorry.”

Cas lays awake for a long time watching Dean sleep.

He never sees the photograph again.

\--

Bobby continues on as the go-to guy for research and fake FBI calls and anything else he can help with in a world where all the rules are changing. They wake up one day and their cell phones have stopped working, have all begun to display “No signal” in small, bright mockery. Cas supposes Bobby will adjust, and he’s right. In fact, they all adjust, immediately giving up using what is surely limited electricity to keep their phones charged. Their lives are a constant state of emergency that can’t be cured by a simple phone call, anyway.

Out of all of them, the transition is easiest for Bobby, who, as he explains it, “lived decades before the damn things even existed, anyway.” It shows, too, in the way he’s still the best at figuring out where the government will target next in its misguided attempts to regain control, where there will still be supplies, where there will still be survivors.

Cas envies him, just a little.

\--

Dean asks him one night, comes right out and says it in a whisper almost too quiet for Cas to hear.

“Do you think it would have made a difference?”

“What?” Cas asks, clumsy compared to the ease with which he used to figure out what Dean is getting at.

“If I had said yes,” Dean says, and Cas swears he can feel his blood go cold. Before Cas has a chance to respond, Dean continues, more to himself than to Cas, “I wonder if it would have made a difference. Would it have stopped the angels from leaving? Stopped you from falling?” He swallows hard before letting out a short, humorless bark of laughter. “I can’t stop thinking about it, about whether or not I could have stopped it. Or whether or not we can ever stop it now. Even if we find the Colt, even if I kill Lucifer, will it even matter? All those people who died, they...they aren’t coming back. Sam isn’t coming back, is he. Your grace is never coming back.”

Cas knows Dean isn’t really expecting an answer, but he whispers an impotent “I don’t know,” anyway, a pathetic excuse of a response for someone who used to feel he had all the world’s secrets at his fingertips.

Cas can’t stand it, the thought that Dean feels as perpetually helpless as he does. This horrible ache gnaws away at him, this ever-present sense that he used to be raw power and now he’s just raw, constantly exposed to realities that chafe against him at every turn. He can’t stop the world from hurting, can’t stop Dean from hurting, can’t even stop himself from hurting. Maybe if he had taken the chance before, maybe if he had just been a little stronger or a little wiser or a little more _something_ , maybe if he had known back then what he knows now -- maybe a thousand different things he could have done could have helped Sam, could have led him back to Dean or kept him from saying yes or _anything_ , really, anything better than this.

But instead he’s just useless, just this person who is asked important questions and offers only perpetual “I don’t know”s.

\--

The next time they find themselves in a town where the local bar is still open, Cas gets drunk for the second time. He laughs too loudly, kisses Dean too breathlessly, too carelessly, too publicly, and he sees the hostile expressions on some of the faces around the bar, but it’s only when Dean half carries him out of the building, apologizing for him on the way, that he realizes he’s made a mistake, that Dean’s desire to escape is caused by something more than concern.

He can’t tell if the booze is making him think differently or just making him realize things he didn’t have the guts to stop lying to himself about before, but on the drive back to camp, a voice in the back of his head whispers to him, tells him he’s nothing more than a proxy for Sam, a convenient presence for Dean to cling to in the absence of his brother. Not that he’s in any place to judge, he supposes, and when he laughs out loud at the thought, Dean gives him a look that’s equal parts concern and annoyance.

By the time they get back to their cabin, Cas has sobered up just enough to put his theory to the test. Dean may be annoyed with him, but he doesn’t object as Cas strips him down and guides him to the bed.

“I love you,” Cas says afterwards, without preamble.

“Oh,” Dean says, and turns away, and that’s the first glimpse Cas gets of who Dean is becoming.

He’ll think back on it later and wonder who he should blame. He figures they both had some responsibility in it: He should have known better; Dean should have responded better. He decides to err on the side of caution and blame them both.

The next time is different. A distinction has formed where previously there was none; it’s the shift from making love to being fucked, something Cas simply lets happen because he’s a creature of habit and too tired to change.

“Cas?” Dean whispers, too soft, searching his face, but Cas is looking at the wall, trying to follow the wood grain from one end to the other. “You with me?”

“I always come when you call, Dean,” he responds, voice flat as his gaze. Cas realizes, vaguely, he’s being cruel.

He supposes that’s who he’s becoming.


	6. 2013

In the end, it isn’t any one thing in particular that causes it, not a specific event where he can’t heal illness or injury with a touch. But it happens anyway, his continued fall, his descent not from angel to human any more but from human to something less, someone who can’t function in this fucked-up world, can’t handle the slow trauma of his everyday existence.

Cas starts with sleeping pills. It’s the logical choice; easy to come up with an excuse since no one sleeps very soundly these days. They work for a while, help stave off the exhaustion that comes from too many nights spent jolted awake by screaming, whether Dean’s or his own.

He’s a few months into his self-prescribed regimen when a night comes where he can’t sleep no matter what he tries. He starts almost without thinking and can’t stop, just keeps taking pill after pill, waiting to see how many it will take before he passes out. He makes a game of it until he loses count, but even then he doesn’t sleep. He sits up in the middle of the night and watches as the world becomes awash in color, and he sees, of all things, Uriel. He figures he’s dreaming. He _must_ be dreaming, so he indulges his unconscious mind, tells his old friend he didn’t do a very good job abandoning this sorry world if he’s come back to hang out in their shitty cabin, talks to him about falling, about becoming human, about everything that’s happened to him since all the other angels went off in search of greener pastures, on and on until his vision blurs and everything fades to black.

Cas wakes with a start an indeterminate amount of time later and feels like he hasn’t slept at all. It’s not far from the truth, which he learns when Dean confirms that he’s only been unconscious for a half hour at most. Dean looks terrified as he explains Cas had been babbling nonsense and freaking him out, as he asks Cas to promise not to do that again.

“I promise,” Cas says, and he means it. Part of him, though -- part of him can’t help but think how comforting it was seeing one of his brothers again, seeing light and life that reminded him of heaven. Even if the experiences were fake, he can’t deny the feelings were real.

Cas manages to keep his promise for a while, right up until a mission they’re running on a rumor of the whisper of the presence of the Colt goes just sideways enough that Cas winds up with a deep gash in his side. Dean hesitates before giving him some oxycodone, capitulating only when Bobby tells him Cas will need stitches to make sure the wound heals properly.

The pain doesn’t go away entirely, but it fades enough that he can force it into the background like he’s used to. He doesn’t see heaven, doesn’t see anyone but Dean, but everything suddenly seems easier, like maybe the apocalypse isn’t as big a deal as he thought it was. He falls asleep happy for the first time in a while, and he hasn’t forgotten the feeling when he wakes up miserable and aching.

It’s not long before he considers himself a connoisseur. A few months of experimenting is all it takes to determine which drugs give him which side effects, both positive and negative. He cross-references them carefully, makes sure he doesn’t screw up so that he’ll actually be around to experience the feelings he intends to induce. He catalogues his favorites, mixing and matching to get the desired effects.

Amphetamines are his favorites, the euphoria and energy well worth the sacrifice of sleep. On the best highs he doesn’t feel fatigue or hunger, feels like power is coursing through his veins, feels like he can do anything. Feels like he’s an angel again, endless possibility stretched before him and all he need do is reach out and take it.

The drugs, he would explain to anyone if they were willing to listen, aren’t just a way to cope. They’re a way to feel like he’s not confined just to the body that’s now only his, a way to say a big “fuck you” to the limits of his human form.

And boy is he getting good at “fuck you”s.

\--

Everything is chemicals.

What’s happening to him, then, must be chemical. Empty as he feels, a body can never be a vacuum, must always obey the basic rules, must always be composed of base elements. Cas realizes this on some level, senses it on some plane he can’t enter, in some place he can’t reach.

He tries to explain this to Dean, once. Tries to make him understand that in theory there is some combination that will bring him back into balance, some addition that must make the percentages of himself go back to equalling precisely one hundred percent. It’s just the practice he’s having trouble with.

He feels Dean inhale long and slow under his arm, feels him exhale in a sigh. “Whatever you say, Cas,” Dean says.

Cas squeezes Dean a little tighter, he buries his face in the back of Dean’s neck. “Forget it,” Cas says.

And Dean will forget it.

Cas can’t remember the molecular mechanisms of memory in all their imperfection, but he recalls just enough to make him hate it. He thinks of the hundreds of billions of nerve cells in the human brain, all the synaptic connections being created and recreated that cumulatively make up a person’s past, present, and future. He imagines the fickle biochemistry upon which memory is entirely dependent, pictures neurotransmitters releasing and dissipating, physical evidence of the transience of memory. He knows long-term memories, unlike short-term ones, involve structural modifications, changes in protein synthesis and gene regulation and the structure of neurons, growth of new synapses, and all of it triggered by nothing more than simple human will.

Cas can already tell Dean has moved on from the moment, has failed to give it the attention it needs to move from short to long term memory.

Cas, though. Cas has lingered on it long enough for those changes to occur, that mental scarring that has solidified the moment in his memory, made it permanent, just like the rest of what’s happening to him.

\--

His first bad experience comes with what isn’t even a miscalculation, just an unlucky mix of amphetamines and absinthe and caffeine. He’s fine one minute and freaking out the next, confused and panicking and unable to focus on any one thought long enough to figure out what’s wrong with him, let alone fix it.

Dean finds him curled on the floor, gasping and frantic, and soothes him just like before, like it’s no big deal. Afterwards, though, no amount of gentleness in Dean’s voice can hide the fact he’s frowning when he says, “This is why you shouldn’t mess around with this shit, Cas.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Cas says, but he thinks of the trade off, the hours and days and weeks that were made bearable in exchange for this one brief period that wasn’t, and he realizes what he means is “It’s worth it.”

\--

That’s it, his big secret, he supposes: He likes the way the drugs fuck with him, likes how he can pick and choose what he wants to feel that day, likes the sense of control, no matter how false or fleeting. He likes how when he’s high he thinks he understands the whole universe like he used to, or maybe even better than he used to.

For all of that, though, he never quite seems able to understand what’s happening between him and Dean.

Dean starts off concerned, offering up solutions to a problem Cas doesn’t believe he has. “It’s gonna be okay,” Dean says, not realizing that it already is. Cas is pretty sure he’s not imagining Dean stepping up his game, becoming more attentive and affectionate and understanding.

When the process reverses, though, Cas is forced to reevaluate, and he’s eventually forced to admit to himself that maybe Dean can’t cope with Cas not coping. He supposes he understands how frustrating it would be to be Dean, feeling unable to keep himself afloat, let alone Cas, who still wants to believe he isn’t drowning. It bubbles to the surface one fine evening. Well, Cas thinks it’s a fine evening, but then again, he’s the only one laughing.

“You’re pathetic,” Dean says.

“Not the label I would have chosen,” Cas responds, “but whatever makes you happy.”

Dean storms out, the reaction a different kind of satisfying than the pills and the booze, and Cas can’t quite decide which he’s more addicted to.

He wonders if Dean resents him as much as he resents himself.

\--

If drugs become his hobby, doling out orders becomes Dean’s. Cas watches Dean transform before his very eyes, watches him slip back into his role as leader, as protector. Every expectation from which Cas had thought himself freed comes back and weighs down on him, and he should have known, he should have known this was going to happen.

Cas doesn’t even remember what it is that sets him off; maybe the tilt of Dean’s chin, the swagger in his stride, something in his voice or the shape of his words.

“You’re your father’s son,” Cas says, and he doesn’t need to spit it to puncture Dean with the sharp edges. He doesn’t mean it, could never mean it, but it comes out like the truth because that’s how good he’s become at lying, both to himself and to everyone else.

Dean goes completely still and says, “You’re damn right I am.”

He walks out and doesn’t return.

\--

Cas wonders if this is what it means to love: Get close enough to someone until you have the power to destroy one another, and then go through with it.

\--

People continue to cycle through the camp, people who go off to find family or friends, to join the military, to search for better shelter, to give up, people who die of illness or heartbreak or with blood on their hands and in their mouths, people who end up with cold hearts and black eyes. Eventually everyone who’s there except for the two of them and Bobby and Chuck, their sad little excuse for a family, sees Cas and Dean as something separate, not as a unit.

The worst part, for Cas, is that no one questions it.

\--

Cas tries to convince Chuck to join him to get high, sometimes; not because they’re friends, really, but because there are certain amounts of loneliness nothing seems potent enough to block out. He finally succeeds, sort of, one quiet night where he manages to convince Chuck to smoke a joint with him. They sit on the roof and watch the night sky, and he’s not nearly high enough and not nearly happy enough, but at least it’s something.

“Why are you here?” Cas asks, legitimately curious. When Chuck just raises an eyebrow in response, he adds, “Do you really think you’re God?”

Chuck smiles wryly at that. “You think I would leave everything like this if I was?”

“No, I suppose not,” Cas says, but he doesn’t believe it. He’d spent so long looking for an absent God that he doesn’t have any trouble at all picturing Chuck in the role: all-powerful and unaware, unable to do anything but bear witness to an apocalypse of his own making.

“I didn’t see myself in it,” Chuck admits, and Cas looks up at that, studies what he can see of Chuck’s face from the side. Chuck takes another drag, holds the smoke in for a long moment before exhaling into the night air. “I wasn’t supposed to be part of this particular nightmare. But I figured I’d do what I could to help, anyway.”

Cas wonders how deep the meaning of that simple statement goes, wonders if he’s still referring to toilet paper or to something more. He wonders how much Chuck has seen, if maybe he’s seen everything, Sam saying yes and Cas falling and Dean becoming -- well, all of them becoming something else. He wonders if Chuck has seen how this ends, if he knows how lonely and desperate they’re all becoming, wonders if he saw that and decided to come anyway, even if he can’t fix it, because maybe just being this background presence will ease the pain. Cas supposes it does, at that, even if just for this night, for these few moments of companionship he’s managed to steal.

“So, mind telling me how I die?” Cas asks, aiming for casual and missing by a mile.

“No spoilers,” Chuck says, voice catching somewhere between the syllables. Cas decides to pretend not to notice.

\--

Cas gets used to being tired.

At first he thinks it's because he's not sleeping well, because he doesn't, usually; too much time on the move, too much in the habit of always remaining alert and on edge. The explanation makes sense, certainly. No one sleeps that well with an apocalypse looming, with a gun under their head and the weight of the world on their shoulders, with the constant worry that makes itself at home when you spend every day wondering if this is the last day you'll eat a good meal, if this is the day you'll be alive if not well, if it's all downhill from here.

He's trying to explain this to Dean one day, as Dean is attempting to clean his weapons in the light of the one flickering bulb Chuck has allowed him, when Dean stops him mid-sentence to say, “Christ, Cas, I don't know. And even if I did, what the hell am I supposed to do about it?”

Something blossoms in Cas’ chest, spreads slow and warm into his limbs, apathetic, paralytic, and that’s when he knows.

He gets used to waking up every day aching, exhausted in a way that won't go away no matter how long he sleeps, no matter how little he moves. He wakes up and lays in bed staring at the ceiling, willing himself to get up, to roll over, to do anything. He promises himself five more minutes, just five more minutes, just five more until hours have passed and he hasn't moved, and then he chastises himself for not being up already, for not being productive, for not being any good to anyone, not even to himself. He tries to shame himself into action and every second it doesn't work only adds to his listlessness.

He reaches a point every morning where he remembers, and that's the worst part: Remembering what it's like not to feel this way, remembering what it was like to be able to function without having to psych himself up first.

It's only then that he's able to convince himself to sit up, to reach for his meds and begin the process of forgetting.

\--

Some days, he’s almost happy.

On those days he’ll wake up feeling not quite fully alive but at least not as close to dead as usual, and he doesn’t know quite how he feels towards Dean on those days, but he has just enough energy to keep himself alert and in check, to wait before he acts and reacts and think, What would a person casually in love do in this scenario?

It’s almost easy, on those days. Sometimes they work together in comfortable silence to build or rebuild, repair a damaged roof, a failing engine, a jammed gun. Sometimes they wind up sitting amiably, talking companionably, and all that winds up in his system is the beer in his hand and the sound of Dean’s voice. Sometimes Dean joins him back in his cabin, makes it feel almost like home, and they come together so simply, fall asleep so effortlessly, that for a few hours he can almost convince himself they aren’t coming apart at every weak point they’ve gained or created over the years. Sometimes Dean will kiss him awake and his smile will almost reach his eyes, and Cas will almost be stupid enough to believe this day will end differently, that everything will be okay. Almost, almost.

Sometimes he treats it like a game, on the days he can't bring himself to care or on the days he cares too much. He stops bothering going to the effort of having facial expressions when he isn’t around other people, or mostly just when Dean isn’t looking, waiting to see if anyone catches him in the act. If he’s feeling especially callous, he sees how impassive he can remain and watches with morbid fascination as Dean becomes angrier and angrier in response.

Sometimes it ends with Dean storming out, and sometimes it’s just the precursor to the storm that follows, the insults they both throw at each other to see which labels end up sticking until their tempers collide and break against one another, until Cas shoves Dean up against a wall and they end up kissing, they end up on the bed, they end up with Dean laying on his stomach, Cas’ hands pressing against his shoulder blades, shoving him against the mattress, and they’re falling, they’re falling, they’re falling.

Cas wakes alone, and that’s how he finds out Dean has slept his usual few hours, must have woken up while Cas was still in his drugged-out sleep, gathered his torn clothes and retreated from the battleground of their relationship.

Cas surveys his skin with vague interest, noting the bruises on his arms in the shape of Dean’s fingers, the bite marks on his shoulders and neck, dozens of little injuries to remind him of exactly where they stand.

Cas knows, distantly, that this should hurt, this whole process of both self and mutual destruction with which he’s become so preoccupied, but the reality is he doesn’t feel much of anything, not pain, not pleasure. He wonders if he’s even capable of feeling genuine emotion anymore.

Cas takes a few pills, and then a few more, and then a few more, until he feels like he’s flying.

\--

Supply raids become increasingly risky ventures, day-long trips to find places where there’s even anything worth salvaging. They hit a jackpot, once, find a Walmart in a town abandoned rather than destroyed at the end of a month with too little food, too little ammunition, too little of everything. Dean goes for sporting goods, the bullets that are protected by nothing more than a pane of glass. Chuck goes for household goods, the toilet paper that’s become more valuable than gold. Cas goes for the pharmacy, defiant, daring Dean to comment. He knows Dean won’t, though, won’t say anything because the truth is they’re in desperate need of medicine for illnesses and infections that can’t be cured with some whisky and a clean bandage.

Once Cas is done there, he heads to the clothing section as an afterthought. He grabs a bunch of stuff in bright colors, strange patterns, stuff with lace and ruffles, flowers sewn along the edges, anything he thinks Dean will hate, and stuffs them into his duffel bag next to the aspirin and antibiotics and amphetamines.

When they get back to camp, he sits alone in his cabin in one of his new outfits. The clothes make his skin itch, rub in all the wrong ways, but he doesn’t take them off, won’t allow himself such a shameful defeat.

“Perfect,” Cas says aloud, to no one, and even he can hear how bitter he sounds.

\--

He doesn’t know what compels him to do it, what twisted desire for justification drives him to watch Dean in action, but he does it nonetheless.

Cas may have forgotten more things than he’ll ever be able to quantify, but he still knows a true master at work when he sees one. Dean tortures with exquisite skill, and something twists inside Cas’ chest when he realizes Dean is actually enjoying it, something that’s an indistinguishable mix of sadness and disgust and satisfaction.

Cas looks at Dean, really _looks_ , for the first time in months, and he does not think of fireworks.

It’s the first time he allows himself to regret pulling Dean from hell, but it isn’t the last.

\--

Dean drives the Jeep on missions, nowadays, and Cas wonders when that transition took place. It slipped his notice, somehow, and for the life of him he can’t recall when Dean stopped driving the Impala everywhere.

He goes looking for it one day when he runs out of excuses not to. He find the poor car a little ways from the camp, and while his enthusiasm for automobiles never could match Dean’s, he still manages to be a little saddened by the rust on the detailing, the dust on the windows, the scratches in the paint.

Struck by a sudden whim, fueled by the knowledge Dean is off on some mission without him, Cas makes his way to Dean’s cabin. He pauses on the threshold to lift the doormat, and it’s not a devil’s trap he finds there but rather angel warding scratched into the wood. He laughs so hard he feels like he’s going to choke on it, and then he opens the door and steps inside.

There’s so little furniture it barely looks like anyone lives there, just the bare necessities. He finds the keys in a drawer in the kitchen he can tell is opened only to add to the collection of items Dean considers junk but isn’t quite ready to throw away.

Cas returns to the car, puts the key in the ignition, and turns it. Nothing happens, and he can’t say he’s really surprised.

He sits in it for a while anyway, breathing in the scent of leather and the indefinable something he associates with Dean, until the smell of mildew and stale air overpowers him and he has to get out.

He moves from the driver’s seat to the hood and dry swallows some pills until the weight he felt settling on his chest dissipates and he can’t focus on anything, least of all why he should be upset by this hunk of metal sitting here rotting in the sun.

With that, Cas throws the keys into the woods and walks away.

\--

By the end of the year, Cas is essentially living two lives: one where he’s drunk or high or a combination of the two, and another where he’s regrettably neither.

It’s almost familiar, the split, like before Sam said yes -- fighting a war on two fronts, but this time one is against the world and the other is just against himself.

Doesn’t matter which war you ask about. Fact of the matter is, he’s losing.


	7. 2014

With the new year comes a new change to the way the game is played.

They had already given up legitimately hunting long ago, saving a few scattered lives less of a priority than maintaining their own. In a sick sort of way some of the problems have been solving themselves, myths and legends dying out along with the people whose beliefs sustained them.

Cas wonders, idly, if even Lucifer was getting bored. It’s the best explanation he can think of the first time they face the spectre of Croatoan, the first time they wind up on a hunt regardless of whether or not they intended to. Monsters come to them, nowadays, monsters home grown right here in the U S of A.

Sometimes, Cas worries he’s becoming one of them.

\--

Of all the labels Dean has tried, “useless junkie” seems to be the one that tastes best on his tongue. He throws it into his request for Cas to come along for a mission so casually that it almost slips past his notice.

The “junkie” part doesn’t bother Cas, really. It’s the truth and no more or less than he expects. There's a twinge of guilt that comes with the “useless” part, though, way down somewhere he thought was buried for good. It comes to the surface one day, unbidden, and in the process it heats into rage.

The next thing Cas knows, he's in Dean's face, saying, "Oh, is that the label you've decided on? Look who's talking!"

Dean looks like he doesn’t know what to say to that, and for some reason it isn’t as satisfying as Cas was hoping. Dean scowls at the floor, as if directing his question at Cas’ rug as he says, “Are you coming or what?” There’s no rage in it, for once, just tired, bitter resignation.

“Of course,” Cas sighs, and when Dean leaves, he gathers up all his drugs of every flavor and throws them in the trash.

The mission goes over without a hitch, and when they get back all of them share a beer and talk and laugh and pretend this one success means anything against all the failures. Dean looks at Cas like he used to, those glances that Cas now knows last a little longer than most people find comfortable, and he's thinking maybe they're both junkies in one way or another, but maybe they're not useless, not quite yet. Maybe they’re still useful to one another.

When the night draws to a close, though, everyone starts going their separate ways, and Dean doesn't follow Cas to his cabin and Cas doesn’t follow Dean to his. He wants to rage, but instead he just digs his shit out of the trash and falls asleep alone with a bottle in his hand, his own private “I told you so.”

He calls Dean “fearless leader” from then on. It tastes like delicious retaliation, but he hates how much he hopes it hurts.

\--

When Cas breaks his foot on their next supply raid, his memory betrays him, takes him back to that first time he was sick unbidden. He still remembers it, can still picture every second that Dean sat with him and took care of him, and he can’t help it; he hopes for that, he wants it so bad it aches more than his shattered bones.

Dean takes the time to stop in every now and then to ask how he’s doing. He shouldn’t be surprised that Dean doesn’t seem to be able to find the time to sit with him, to stay with him for longer than five minutes at a time, but he is. It shouldn’t hurt as much as it does, but it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

Cas heals slowly and agonizingly, and he knows his foot’s never going to be quite the same again, but he supposes it’s just as well.

\--

Cas had pulled Dean from hell and rebuilt him on orders, knowing what the angels had in store for him, and so he placed before Dean a test of his own volition: when he woke in that shallow grave, would he claw his way out or succumb to a slow death by suffocation, thinking the whole thing a new kind of trick? He pulled Dean from hell, but it was ultimately Dean who had to choose to save himself.

Looking back now, he realizes how little he understood humans then.

He watches Dean self-destruct and realizes it was probably reflex, just muscle memory that made Dean claw his way up through the ground and back into this life. Even after he walked the earth again, he probably thought it was a trick. He probably thinks it even now.

\--

Sense memory becomes Cas’ greatest adversary after a while.

As they drift further and further apart, the actual smell and taste and sound and feel of Dean is replaced by things that remind Cas of him, dozens of tiny reminders of what he’s lost.

He’ll be doing something totally innocuous, eating canned food or going for a walk or getting dressed in the morning, brushing his teeth, scratching an itch, and suddenly it’ll just hit him out of nowhere, some memory of Dean, and it’ll take his breath away. It happens even when he’s cleaning his guns, the smell triggering something half-forgotten, leaving him wondering when the weight of a gun in his hands became more familiar than the feel of Dean against his palms.

The drugs don’t stop it from happening, no matter how many combinations Cas tries.

\--

Cas is standing outside smoking one day, watching Dean hop from the Jeep in a triumphant return from a mission, when he’s startled by the voice of a person he didn’t sense approaching.

“He’s cripplingly beautiful, isn’t he?” the voice asks, and it turns out to belong to another inhabitant of the camp, someone whose name Cas hasn’t even bothered to learn.

He considers this for a second, examining Dean in his jeans and t-shirt and jacket, Dean frowning and dirty and wearing that damn thigh holster, and Cas can’t help it when his lungs start to burn with something other than the smoke, some unidentifiable emotion stabbing at his chest, making it hard to breathe.

He can’t keep the bitterness out of his voice as he responds. “Yes, that’s a good way to describe him.”

\--

Cas finds out Dean has been sleeping around entirely on accident.

Dean has a shit-eating grin on his face as he brags to someone else in the camp, but it shifts into a frown when he notices Cas staring, mouth slightly ajar. “What?” Dean asks, not a real question. A dare.

Cas walks away. That night, he swallows an entire bottle of pills.

He’s shocked to find himself opening his eyes an indeterminate amount of time later. He’s forgotten a lot of things, but the basic principles of the human body are not one of them. He doesn’t even die right. Figures.

Cas is contemplating his misfortune when Chuck and Dean jump up from where they were sitting in quiet conversation across the room. Chuck looks concerned, but Dean just looks pissed.

“What the fuck were you thinking? Don’t you realize you could’ve killed yourself?”

It’s a rhetorical question, but Cas decides to answer anyway. “That was the idea, yeah.”

The look on Dean’s face before he storms out is a bitter consolation for the fact that Cas is still alive.

When Chuck repeats the question a few hours later, significantly more gently, Cas has already worked out the answer.

“Profound bond,” he explains, and Chuck nods like it makes sense to him. Maybe it does. Maybe he wrote about the way Cas knit his grace in with Dean’s flesh and bones as he pieced him back together.

Cas doesn’t ask because he doesn’t care.

\--

Bobby comes to Cas one day out of the blue, and it occurs to him that the reason it even feels out of the blue is because they haven’t spoken in months, their lives barely intersecting in spite of their proximity.

Bobby doesn’t look angry, though; just sad. The lack of communication has been driving him crazy, the way he’s been watching Cas and Dean snipe at each other and never even consider coming to him for help. He can’t take it any more, is tired not just of that but of sending kids off to their deaths with his intel on where they’ll be able to find food or meds or toiletries or long-lost family members. If he’s going to die, he’s going to do it on his own terms, on his own turf, even if it’s just an excuse not to watch what little family he has left fall apart.

The last thing Bobby does is hand Cas a piece of paper containing a set of coordinates. “You’ll find the Colt there,” he explains with a sigh, refusing to offer any further explanation as he burdens Cas with the final decision regarding how the rest of this story is going to go.

Cas tries very hard to be grateful.

\--

It makes it easier, in a way, once he decides to pass on the information to Dean. There’s something comforting about the fact that it sets them on a clear path, leads them to what feels almost like their destiny. It puts everyone on a clock, and Cas figures he may as well enjoy what time he has left as best he can.

He starts the orgies on a whim, bringing in anyone who will come, so many of them people like him just looking for a distraction. They’re soft and naive and he thankfully, mercifully doesn’t know what their souls look like. Cas knows the attendees don’t love him, wouldn’t be here if they were interested in such things, but it’s just as well. At least they don’t remind him of Dean, and that’s good enough because it needs to be.

When Dean realizes what’s going on, he just rolls his eyes and says, “I give up.”

_Good_ , Cas thinks. _So have I_.

\--

Cas’ new pastime only really becomes a concern when the food starts running out in earnest. No matter how many raids they go on, no matter how carefully Chuck rations what they bring back, everything is in short supply, even generosity. Or perhaps especially generosity, Cas thinks when he sees the expressions on the current inhabitants’ faces every time someone shows up at the camp lost and hurting and hungry.

He takes them in anyway, invites them into his cabin and into his bed, if not into himself. He shares the booze and drugs he’s been hoarding so carefully, offering them these things that will not take away their hunger but will at least serve as a distraction, a numbing agent.

Dean comes to Cas himself, eventually, to tell him he can’t keep having these little get-togethers, can’t keep letting in any stranger who wanders by. “There isn’t enough food to go around,” Dean says, as if that’s enough of an explanation.

Cas just shrugs, and when he speaks, he sounds as casually defiant as he was hoping. “Oh? What are you going to do about it?”

Dean is incoherent with rage as he storms off, jaw set and fists clenched.

It doesn’t matter. There are more important battles to fight than this one, and there isn’t enough of Dean to go around, either.

\--

She comes to Cas the day after Dean dumps her, and for all her public hysterics, she seems exceedingly calm. Cas is suddenly on guard, not sure why she’s there. He doesn’t even remember her name, this woman who Dean welcomed into his bed night after night, this woman whose presence in his cabin feels like an invasion.

When Cas asks her what she wants, she says, simply, “I want to talk to you.” He knows enough of being human, now, to fear those words, but even her ominous pause doesn’t prepare him for what she says next.

“Castiel.”

Something flares up in him, then: sharp, sudden rage the like of which he hasn’t felt in months, the like of which he thought he was no longer capable of feeling through the haze of depressants. He wants to throw her out, wants to take her by her shoulders and scream in her face, wants to fuck her into the mattress without mercy, see if that will make him understand Dean more, love or hate him any less.

Instead, he turns away. “It’s just Cas, now.”

“You know,” she says, “Dean isn’t the only one who was a hunter before the apocalypse. I’ve read them. Chuck’s books. Actually, the only reason I got out of Chicago in time is because I read about it in advance. Guess a couple million of my neighbors weren’t so lucky.” She laughs, then, but she sounds about as happy as Cas feels. “Look, I’m not going to pretend I put up a fight when he came to me. Figured why waste a perfectly good opportunity, you know? But after, when he said we had a ‘connection’...well, that’s when I finally put two and two together.”

“I don’t follow,” Cas says. He’s lying, but he wants her to say it, wants to see if hearing it from someone else will be as exquisitely painful as he imagines.

“You’re in love with him.”

He was absolutely right.

Cas laughs in the way Dean taught him, dry and bitter to keep himself from crying. “And what a difference that seems to have made.”

She frowns like that wasn’t the reaction she was expecting. “I just wanted you to know I’m not mad at him for my sake. I’m mad at him for yours,” she explains anyway, as if it’s supposed to make him feel better.

Cas scoffs. “Why? If you know who I am, then you must know I failed.”

She looks at him levelly. “I know you stayed.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything. Just looks anywhere but at her. When he finally speaks, he hardly recognizes his own voice.

“It hurts more every time.”

To her credit, she doesn’t tell him she understands. Instead, she says, “I’m sorry for my part in it. For what it’s worth.” She sounds sincere, but Cas has lost his taste for apologies.

Eventually, she sighs, giving up on waiting for a response and turning to go. She pauses at the door, though, turns around like it’s an afterthought. “Take care, Cas,” she says.

“Thanks,” he whispers, but he won’t.

\--

Cas used to be able to see reality as something fluid, something mutable, a simple matter of quantum mechanics. All the possibilities used to stretch out before him to infinity, each decision, no matter how minor, creating a potential reality until there were billions upon billions overlapping in a cacophony of possibilities. Nowadays, he only sees the one, and even then he only sees the present. He realizes, on some level, his choices, Dean’s choices, the choices of every person still alive on this godforsaken planet, must still be working just like they used to, but yet it still feels like nothing so much as fate.

On his worst days, Cas tries to recapture even a bit of what he used to see. He tries to imagine the series of decisions great and small that could have led to a 2014 where he and Dean are in love without needing to hurt each other to prove it, where Sam is himself and the world is not in shambles and nothing hurts. He wants it so bad he hallucinates it, sometimes, when he’s just barely on the right side of overdosing, and on those days he could swear he feels Dean’s hands warm and gentle against his skin, feels Dean wrapped around him instead of his own hand, feels Dean’s breath ghosting against his skin with every whispered _I love you_ , and he falls asleep with Dean’s arm across his waist and Dean’s head on his shoulder and it’s just like that, that version of now in which he’s happy.

But he invariably wakes up alone, and on those mornings he thinks about the choices that led him here, to this. He wonders, sometimes, if in the reality where Dean calls Sam and apologizes, where relief spreads across his features as Sam agrees to come back -- he wonders if that reality has anything in common with this one. Maybe in that reality, Sam comes back and the fight against the apocalypse goes on and neither Winchester consents to let themselves be a pawn in this stupid game. Maybe Cas is still Castiel, still an angel who rejoins the fight in heaven and continues to carry out his relationship with Dean in bits and pieces, in shared glances that can be explained away by Cas’ lack of social grace, in touches that are just brief enough to be written off as platonic. Maybe he’s there one day and gone the next, never long enough for anything more to take hold, nothing more than a possibility wavering at the edges of their lives, never solidifying into something else.

He thinks maybe Sam leaving was the catalyst that brought them together, and the thought makes him want to throw up. He was given this opportunity because of Sam’s absence, because Dean could stop focusing on protecting his little brother and learn to want things for himself. All of that selfish opportunity and here Cas let himself become another burden to Dean, someone else to take care of. What a disappointment he must be, another name crossed off the list of people Dean failed to save, no matter how hard he tried.

The worst part is that he asks himself if, given the chance, would he make the trade? If he knew the one choice, the one thing that would stop the apocalypse from happening, would he go through with it if the cost would be even the brief bit of happiness he had with Dean?

Cas poses the question to himself thousands of times in thousands of ways, and the answer is always a despairing “I don’t know.”

\--

Dean comes to Cas the night before they’re going to try and kill the devil, presents Cas with the Colt as if he’s not utterly unnerved by the thought of leveling the barrel at his brother.

“So, you have a plan?” Cas asks, because he refuses to touch anything that’s going to put a bullet into Sam.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “I’m going to get you killed.” The look he has in his eyes, the way his voice catches a little in his throat, Cas can almost hear the _I love you_ behind it.

“Yeah,” Cas sighs. “I know.” It comes out more bitter than he intended. There’s no reason for him to be upset, really. He’s been dying for a long time now.

Part of Cas wants to ask Dean to stay, wants to think Dean is trying to wind himself up to ask the same question, but neither of them quite manages to go through with it.

Cas has a radio he doesn’t use since most of the stations stopped airing anything a long time ago. People have better things to do with their time, he figures, more important things than music, but there’s something to be said for background noise, for a distraction to drown out your thoughts.

Cas digs up an old cassette player from way in the bottom of a drawer, goes through half a dozen batteries before he finds a combination that lets him power it on.

He only has the one tape, so he pops it in, places the headphones over his ears, and presses play.

“A playlist for the end of the world,” he mumbles.

He falls asleep alone.

\--

Cas and Dean drive to their deaths together.

It’s just the two of them in one of their few remaining cars, something that’s community property, that belongs to no one. There was some unspoken agreement that no one else would join them, and Cas marvels at the fact that in spite of everything, they’re still a team; there’s still something unbreakable and indefinable between them, tying them together.

Not ten minutes have passed before Cas swears he can feel the weight of the words they both want to say hanging in the air between them, suffocating.

Cas doesn’t _know_ how this is going to end, strictly speaking, but he figures there are a pretty limited number of possibilities. Either Dean will live and so Cas will live, or Dean will die and so he’ll die. He likes that it’s finally that simple, like the flip of a coin, and hates how fucked up it is that he finds that comforting.

There may be only two possible outcomes, but it’s not a 50/50 chance of either one, though, that’s for sure. Cas is fairly certain this is the last chance he’ll have to say what he wants to say, and he wants to say so many things. He may not understand exactly how or why things went wrong, but he still knows Dean well enough to see he’s blaming himself for everything, for Sam saying yes and for Cas falling and for the world going to shit. He wants to tell Dean that he didn’t do anything wrong, that there’s no way either of them could have been prepared for how things would go, that nothing they could have done would have prevented a plan so carefully constructed, that they should both stop trying to take the blame for everything.

But he doesn’t say any of that. After all, he’s not quite sure who he’s trying to convince.

It’s all business as they drive, as they get out, as they double check their conventional weapons while Dean loads the Colt. It’s only when they’re finally ready that Dean meets Cas’ eyes, and Dean’s face is twisted into an expression Cas hates that he recognizes and hates even more that he understands. He finally gets it, finally gets how Sam must have felt about Ruby in spite of everything, in spite of the lies and the betrayal and the downward spiral.

Dean takes Cas aside at that last minute, pulling him into a hug so tight it’s painful. Dean whispers “I love you” like an accusation, and Cas returns the embrace.

“I know,” Cas says, because what else is there to say?

Dean surprises him with a lopsided grin. “All right, Han Solo,” he says, and it’s the closest to legitimately happy he’s sounded in months.

Cas understands the joke, and it’s absurd, it’s absurd he’s thinking of this now, of an evening years ago where Dean had sat him down through six straight movies so he could never brush off another Death Star analogy. It’s absurd to even consider the obvious comparison, to hope that Dean will rescue him this time, free him from the carbonite he’s letting himself be encased in of his own volition. Cas longs for that story, though, that movie magic that makes everything turn out okay for Han and Leia in the end.

But this is real life, and it wasn’t enough, the way either of them felt. It wasn’t enough to fix either of them, and for the first time, staring death in the face, Cas realizes maybe it wasn’t of any fault of their own.

“I don’t understand that reference,” Cas says, grinning, and then they’re off.

\--

Dean leads them into the slaughter they all saw coming hundreds of miles away, into the massacre that Cas realizes, now, has been five years in the making, a tangled mess of choices between a single phone call and this: this assortment of people who on their own are not quite friends, but who go to their deaths guns blazing because they may not mean much to each other, but Dean means something to each of them, and each of them desperately wants to believe they mean something to Dean.

Five minutes in and his body is telling him he’s dying, but he knows better. He knows he’ll feel every second of what happens to him as long as Dean still breathes, and as he watches blood spread across his shirt and drip down onto his shoes he wonders, idly, how the agony he’s experiencing compares to what Dean must be feeling, seeing the devil himself wearing Sam’s skin so comfortably. That’s what was always the most frightening about Lucifer, he thinks; he cloaks himself in beauty and truth, and that’s exactly what makes him so dangerous.

Cas, though. Cas must look horrific by this point, because even the Croats, those beings stripped down to the basest elements of humanity, have stopped trying to tear him apart just to watch him, to puzzle over the fact he’s still fighting, let alone breathing. Some of them have cocked their heads to the side in bewilderment, and Cas would laugh if just existing at this point wasn’t such torture.

He lets himself sink to the ground, finally, dropping his gun. _Profound bond_ , he thinks. What a blessing.

He closes his eyes and part of him thinks this is just temporary, this is his carbonite, and the next time he can see it’ll be Dean there picking him up and dragging him to safety, dragging him home.

But there’s no stasis here, just unending pain, and this isn’t a movie. Even though Cas gave up praying a long time ago, in that moment, in this agony, he can’t help himself.

He prays for Dean to die.


	8. end

Cas is a little shocked to find himself in heaven, truth be told. But then again, Cas knows from experience it’s not a place where wounds are healed or sins are forgiven.

As if to prove him right, he isn’t even given a whole road; just half of one, a wall dividing it down the center, limiting his view. He starts walking, anyway, because what else can he do?

There are places he recognizes along the way, pieces of cities and motels and middle-of-nowheres, excerpts from his human life, reminders of the life he had with Dean. He wonders at it, this evidence before him: that despite the fact he existed for millennia, despite the fact that so much of his human experience was spent in anguish, it was nonetheless who he became as a human that really defined him, that really mattered to him.

He follows along the wall, glancing at the oases of his life as he passes them by, knowing, somehow, he won’t be satisfied with what he finds inside. He feels an overpowering need to know what’s at the end of this road, and he isn’t sure what he’s expecting, but he’s pretty sure it’s no longer going to be a Tuesday afternoon in a park.

What Cas finds there, an intangible amount of time later, is Camp Chitaqua. He has to admit he’s a little surprised at that, but maybe it makes sense. Maybe even though he was already kind of falling apart by the time they got there, he was still with Dean and it was the closest thing he ever had to a home and a family. The cabin that eventually became only Cas’ stands before him in perfect, life-size replica, and he suspects he knows, now, what’s on the other side of the wall.

Cas doesn’t panic. He doesn’t doesn’t rage or lash out or scream. He doesn’t walk along the wall, looking for the end, because he already knows there isn’t one.

He thinks of all the best and worst nights of his life, of the mutual ability to destroy. He reaches out, brushing the wall as gently as he can. Cracks form at his fingertips, not enough to see through. Not enough to bring the whole thing to the ground. But enough.

Cas sits with his back to the wall, closes his eyes, and waits.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To [casamancy](http://casamancy.tumblr.com), whose wonderful art so perfectly captures in images what I was trying to convey through text; [propinquitous](http://propinquitous.tumblr.com), whose unending enthusiasm and thoughtful input is forever irreplaceable; [heyheyassbutt](http://heyheyassbutt.tumblr.com), SPN academic extraordinaire who is the reason I'm still writing today; my husband, who mercifully never asks too many questions; and everyone who took the time to read this fic: I am a little bit in love with all of you.


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